PHP 5.5 on Raspbian Raspberry Pi

Raspberry pi runs Debian Wheezy, but with just one quick line change we can upgrade to Debian Jessie which is a newer version and provides PHP 5.5 binaries (5.5.8 at the time of this blog post.)

Start out by editing the APT sources:

vim /etc/apt/sources.list

Change wheezy to jessie, so that it looks like this:

deb http://mirrordirector.raspbian.org/raspbian/ jessie main contrib non-free rpi

(Don’t add or remove any lines, just change the one above)

Now run:

apt-get update && apt-get upgrade && apt-get autoremove

If you havent aready installed PHP, you can do it now via:

apt-get install php5 php5-cli

Finally, confirm your PHP version:

php -v

This should result in:

PHP 5.5.8-2 (cli) (built: Jan 18 2014 07:39:52)
Copyright (c) 1997-2013 The PHP Group
Zend Engine v2.5.0, Copyright (c) 1998-2013 Zend Technologies