How to change the PHP version in Laradock?
I’ve recently switched to Laradock as my primary local development setup for Laravel. It’s a full PHP development environment based on Docker. It took me a few days to properly set it up and learn the basics of Docker. Laradock comes with big a list of premade images you can use.
I previously used Laravel Homestead, an official, a pre-packaged Vagrant box that provides something similar. To run this box I had to install VirtualBox. This setup works totally fine and is very reliable, but I wanted to switch to a more general solution. I do still use it on my Laptop.
Changing the PHP version was one of the customizations I had to make. Laradock made this really easy.
Step 1
Find the .env file in your Laradock directory.
Step 2
Search for the PHP_VERSION variable and update the version to the preferred one.
Step 3
Rebuild the php-fpm and workspace by running:
docker-compose build php-fpm
docker-compose build workspace
Step 4
Before these changes are taken into account you will have to recreate the Laradock container.
docker-compose down
docker-compose up -d nginx mysql phpmyadmin redis workspace
Step 5
If you want to determine if these actions have changed the PHP version, you will have to do the following things:
1 - View a PHP file with echo phpinfo() through your webserver and check the version.
2 - Run php -v on your server by opening bash via docker-compose exec workspace bash