PHP 7 on Drupal VM

Drupal VM fully supports PHP 7, but currently defaults to 5.6 in order to maximize compatibility with older Drupal 6 and 7 sites. Soon, Drupal VM will change its defaults to install PHP 7.x instead of 5.x, but until then, follow the instructions below to use PHP 7.

Note: If you have Ansible installed on your host machine, make sure you're running the latest version of all Ansible role dependencies by running ansible-galaxy install -r provisioning/requirements.yml --force inside the root Drupal VM project folder.

Ubuntu 14.04¶

Ondřej Surý's PPA for PHP 7.0 is included with Drupal VM, and you can make the following changes/additions to config.yml to use it:

php_version: "7.0"
php_packages:
  - php7.0-common
  - php7.0-cli
  - php7.0-dev
  - php7.0-fpm
  - libpcre3-dev
  - php7.0-gd
  - php7.0-curl
  - php7.0-imap
  - php7.0-json
  - php7.0-opcache
  - php7.0-xml
  - php7.0-mbstring
php_mysql_package: php7.0-mysql
php_fpm_daemon: php7.0-fpm
php_conf_paths:
  - /etc/php/7.0/fpm
  - /etc/php/7.0/apache2
  - /etc/php/7.0/cli
php_extension_conf_paths:
  - /etc/php/7.0/fpm/conf.d
  - /etc/php/7.0/apache2/conf.d
  - /etc/php/7.0/cli/conf.d
php_fpm_pool_conf_path: "/etc/php/7.0/fpm/pool.d/www.conf"

Also, comment out xhprof, redis and memcached from the installed_extras list, as these extensions are not yet supported for PHP 7 (as of late 2015).

You can also build from source using the same/included geerlingguy.php Ansible role, but that process is a bit more involved and for power users comfortable with the process.

RedHat/CentOS 7¶

Remi's RPM repository is included with Drupal VM, and you can make the following changes to use it to install PHP 7:

Make sure you've followed the directions for switching to CentOS 7 in the use a different base OS guide.
Change php_version inside config.yml to "7.0".
Comment out xhprof, xdebug, redis and memcached from the installed_extras list, as these extensions are not yet supported for PHP 7 (as of early 2016).