Upgrading PHP

Introduction

Pterodactyl 2.0 needs PHP 8.3 or 8.4. If your server runs an older version, such as PHP 8.1 or 8.2 from Pterodactyl 1.x, upgrade PHP before you upgrade the Panel.

This guide upgrades PHP on Ubuntu to PHP 8.4. To upgrade to PHP 8.3 instead, replace 8.4 with 8.3 in every command.

Installing the New Version

First, add the ondrej/php repository, which provides newer versions of PHP for Ubuntu:

apt -y install software-properties-common
LC_ALL=C.UTF-8 add-apt-repository -y ppa:ondrej/php

Then install the new version with the extensions the Panel needs:

apt update
apt -y install php8.4 php8.4-{common,cli,gd,mysql,mbstring,bcmath,xml,fpm,curl,zip,intl}

Installing the new version also makes it the default php command. Check it with:

php -v

Updating the Web Server

The web server still sends requests to the old version's PHP-FPM, so point it at the new one.

sed -i -e 's/php8\.[0-9]-fpm\.sock/php8.4-fpm.sock/' /etc/nginx/sites-available/pterodactyl.conf
systemctl reload nginx

Restarting the Queue Worker

The queue worker keeps running the old version until it restarts:

systemctl restart pteroq

Checking the Panel

To confirm that the new version has everything the Panel needs, run this command from the Panel's directory:

cd /var/www/pterodactyl
composer check-platform-reqs --no-dev

Then open the Panel in your browser. Once everything works, you may remove the old version, for example with apt -y purge 'php8.3*'.