Setting Up a Clean PHP 8.4 and Composer Dev Environment on Ubuntu

Why PHP 8.4 on Ubuntu?

PHP 8.4 brings significant language enhancements, including property hooks, asymmetric visibility, new array helper functions, and JIT compiler optimizations. Here is how to configure a pristine development workstation on Ubuntu.

Step 1: Add the Trusted Ondrej Sury PPA

Ubuntu's default universe repository often lags behind current PHP releases. Add the maintainer repository:

sudo apt update
sudo apt install -y software-properties-common ca-certificates lsb-release apt-transport-https
sudo add-apt-repository -y ppa:ondrej/php
sudo apt update

Step 2: Install PHP 8.4 and Essential Extensions

Install the CLI runtime, FPM process manager, and the core extension suite required by modern frameworks like Laravel and Symfony:

sudo apt install -y \
  php8.4-cli \
  php8.4-fpm \
  php8.4-common \
  php8.4-mysql \
  php8.4-pgsql \
  php8.4-sqlite3 \
  php8.4-curl \
  php8.4-mbstring \
  php8.4-xml \
  php8.4-zip \
  php8.4-bcmath \
  php8.4-intl \
  php8.4-readline

Step 3: Verifying the Installation

Confirm the active PHP version from your terminal:

php -v

Step 4: Installing Composer Globally

Download the official Composer installer script and move the executable into your system path:

php -r "copy('https://getcomposer.org/installer', 'composer-setup.php');"
php composer-setup.php --install-dir=/usr/local/bin --filename=composer
php -r "unlink('composer-setup.php');"

composer --version

Your Ubuntu system is now ready for modern PHP development with dependency management and framework tooling.