Since I moved away from 1&1 IONOS, updates will be irregular!

1&1 IONOS has been a fairly early adopter to PHP 7 in their Shared Webhosting and provides regular updates to the latest version in every 7.x branch. However, for some reason the latest version available in the shell is runnning behind. This could get you into trouble, for example when using composer, where your desired package has a requirement higher than the version available. This article delivers a solution.

Login to your environment with ssh and follow these steps:

• PHP 7.4

  wget --content-disposition https://mr42.me/dl/php74
  tar xjf php74.tar.bz2
  echo "alias php='LD_LIBRARY_PATH=~/bin/lib ~/bin/php74-cli'" >> ~/.bashrc
  

• PHP 8.0

  wget --content-disposition https://mr42.me/dl/php80
  tar xjf php80.tar.bz2
  echo "alias php='LD_LIBRARY_PATH=~/bin/lib ~/bin/php80-cli'" >> ~/.bashrc
  

You can either log out and log back in, or run . ~/.bashrc in order to run php on the command line.