PHP 5.6 on Drupal VM

Drupal VM defaults to PHP 7, but you can install and use 5.6 if you need to maximize compatibility with older Drupal 6 and 7 sites.

Ubuntu 16.04¶

Ubuntu 16.04 Xenial defaults to PHP 7.0 in it's system packages. No older versions of PHP will be supported if using this base box.

Ubuntu 14.04 / Ubuntu 12.04¶

Ondřej Surý's PPA for PHP 7.0 is used to install PHP 7, but you can switch to using different 5.6 packages instead by making the following changes to config.yml:

vagrant_box: geerlingguy/ubuntu1404
php_version: "5.6"
php_install_recommends: no
php_packages:
  - php5.6
  - php5.6-apcu
  - php5.6-mcrypt
  - php5.6-cli
  - php5.6-common
  - php5.6-curl
  - php5.6-dev
  - php5.6-fpm
  - php5.6-gd
  - php5.6-sqlite3
  - php5.6-xml
  - php5.6-mbstring
  - libpcre3-dev
php_conf_paths:
  - /etc/php/5.6/fpm
  - /etc/php/5.6/apache2
  - /etc/php/5.6/cli
php_extension_conf_paths:
  - /etc/php/5.6/fpm/conf.d
  - /etc/php/5.6/apache2/conf.d
  - /etc/php/5.6/cli/conf.d
php_fpm_daemon: php5.6-fpm
php_fpm_conf_path: "/etc/php/5.6/fpm"
php_fpm_pool_conf_path: "/etc/php/5.6/fpm/pool.d/www.conf"
php_mysql_package: php5.6-mysql

If you're using Apache with mod_php you should also add libapache2-mod-php5.6 to the php_packages list.

Also, if you're using one of the installed_extras, you may need to update the package names accordingly:

# If you install `redis`:
php_redis_package: php5.6-redis

# If you install `memcached`:
php_memcached_package: php5.6-memcached

# If you install `xhprof`:
xhprof_download_url: https://github.com/phacility/xhprof/archive/master.tar.gz
xhprof_download_folder_name: xhprof-master

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 5.6 instead of 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 "5.6".