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My experience with web servers has been: Total Noob -> Working for a cPanel hosting provider.

About a year ago, I set myself a fun challenge of configuring a webserver as closely as I would a cPanel server... without cPanel. I was level 1 at this point, so it's good prep for promotion.

The biggest surprise was of course, no PHP 7?! I guess I've been spoiled in that respect. Now every time I'm configuring a new server, I have an internal rage while I google around trying to remember which repo I added last time.

The question I have is - why doesn't Centos/Redhat have PHP 7 in their own repos? And, of the many repos that do have PHP 7, are any of them more reliable than the others, or is it about same-same?

I've literally signed up to server fault just to ask this question, as I couldn't find it anywhere through Google. You just tend to get instructions on how to install [webstatic,ius,remi] repos. So apologies if this is a dupe.

HBruijn
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Will
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    I googled for 'RHEL php7' and found [this](https://access.redhat.com/solutions/2146821), [this](https://access.redhat.com/discussions/2919611), and [this](https://www.softwarecollections.org/en/scls/rhscl/rh-php70/) as 3 of the top 4 results. This is PHP 7 in CentOS and RHEL supplied repos. The premise of your question is invalid. –  Sep 30 '17 at 02:40
  • Somewhat valid point. Google "centos php7" you'll see what I've been seeing. – Will Oct 01 '17 at 07:00
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    You are using CPanel, so not CentOS, you should ask your cpanel support (as PHP is not pulled from official repository on a such altered distrobution). BTW HBruijn answer is valid for official RHEL/CentOS. – Remi Collet Oct 02 '17 at 07:53

1 Answers1

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You select an enterprise distribution for its long term stability. The tools included in your enterprise Linux distribution such as Python, gcc, PHP, Ruby, Perl, Java etc. get the same support life cycle as the OS: up to ten years.
To maintain that compatibility, the major versions of these tools are fixed at the time of the "dot-zero" release of your Enterprise Linux distribution (RHEL, CentOS and other derivatives but similar conceptually in Ubuntu LTS etc.).

If your developers (or their employer) can afford a much shorter product life cycle Red Hat/CentOS offer a separate repository called the Red Hat Software Collections (RHSCL) which offers versions of popular open source languages, databases and (web) development tools, which are both newer and more frequently updated. The community equivalent is softwarecollections.org

On CentOS enabling the Software collections is as simple as yum install centos-release-scl

For Red Hat enabling RHSCL depends on how your RHEL system is managed but the steps are documented here

HBruijn
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