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Upgrade PHP from 7.2 to 7.4 on Amazon Linux 2

In response to WordPress warning about the version of PHP, I decided I should upgrade:

My WordPress operates on an EC2 instance as described in a previous blog post and steps to update are described below:

STEP 1: ssh to the EC2 instance with PuTTY or similar (I’m using WSL – Windows Subsystem for Linux to connect from a Ubuntu shell).

STEP 2: Update the system, note this does not update php:

$ sudo yum update

STEP 3: Check the version of PHP and make sure the amazon-linux-extras package is installed:

$ php -v
$ which amazon-linux-extras

STEP 4: Verify the PHP7.x topic is available:

$ sudo amazon-linux-extras | grep php

STEP 5: Disable both the php7.2 and lamp-mariadb10.2-php7.2 topics

$ sudo amazon-linux-extras disable php7.2
$ sudo amazon-linux-extras disable lamp-mariadb10.2-php7.2

If you see the warning “Beware that disabling topics is not supported after they are installed.” it can be safely ignored.

STEP 6: Check the status of available topics

$ sudo amazon-linux-extras | grep php

STEP 7: Enable the php7.4 topic.

$ sudo amazon-linux-extras enable php7.4

STEP 8: Check with

$ sudo amazon-linux-extras | grep php

STEP 9: Update to PHP 7.4. First clean up the metadata and then install php along with any dependencies:

$ sudo yum clean metadata
$ sudo yum install php

STEP 10: Check the version of PHP

$ php -v

STEP 11: Reboot the instance or just restart apache with:

$ sudo systemctl restart httpd

STEP 12: Test the WordPress site and verify

The steps above were sufficient for my setup but may be different in other environments.