How to Install PHP on Alpine Linux?

Alpine Linux is a Linux distro that is lightweight and security-focused. The main aim of alpine is to be minimalistic be it in scope or space. Since it is small in size it is used in those containers which require less time for booting. Unlike other distros which use GNU, Glibc alpine used musl, busybox. PHP is a general-purpose, server-side scripting language that is used for making dynamic and interactive websites. It was created by a danish programmer in 1993. PHP is short for PHP: HYPERTEXT PREPROCESSOR. Some features of PHP are:

• It is open-source and has a large number of users.
• Used in creating dynamic web content.
• Multi-server and Multi-platform compatible.
• Supports a large number of databases.

Today we will be looking at the installation of PHP on alpine Linux.  A Linux environment will be used in this article (UBUNTU) and it will be used docker to create an alpine container. So make sure to know the basic docker commands.

Installing PHP on Alpine Linux

Step 1: Pull the alpine image from the docker hub.

docker pull alpine

Step 2: Now make a container from this image and enter it. The name of the container will be sample_cont for this article.

docker run -t -d –name <container_name> alpine

Now run commands inside this container using the “exec” command. Keep in mind that alpine has a “sh” shell.

docker exec -it sample_cont /bin/sh

Installing PHP

Make sure to upgrade and update the packages, using the apk command.

apk update && apk upgrade

Now write the command to install PHP.

apk add php  ( you can specify the version also, by default it fetches the latest version)

To verify the installation and check the version type the command below.

php -v

So this is how PHP can be installed on an alpine Linux system, hope this article was helpful.