nixpkgs/doc/languages-frameworks/php.section.md

PHP

User Guide

Using PHP

Overview

Several versions of PHP are available on Nix, each of which having a wide variety of extensions and libraries available.

The attribute php refers to the version of PHP considered most stable and thoroughly tested in nixpkgs for any given release of NixOS. Note that while this version of PHP may not be the latest major release from upstream, any version of PHP supported in nixpkgs may be utilized by specifying the desired attribute by version, such as php74.

Only versions of PHP that are supported by upstream for the entirety of a given NixOS release will be included in that release of NixOS. See PHP Supported Versions.

Interactive tools built on PHP are put in php.packages; composer is for example available at php.packages.composer.

Most extensions that come with PHP, as well as some popular third-party ones, are available in php.extensions; for example, the opcache extension shipped with PHP is available at php.extensions.opcache and the third-party ImageMagick extension at php.extensions.imagick.

The different versions of PHP that nixpkgs provides is located under attributes named based on major and minor version number; e.g., php74 is PHP 7.4 with commonly used extensions installed, php74base is the same PHP runtime without extensions.

Installing PHP with packages

A PHP package with specific extensions enabled can be built using php.withExtensions. This is a function which accepts an anonymous function as its only argument; the function should take one argument, the set of all extensions, and return a list of wanted extensions. For example, a PHP package with the opcache and ImageMagick extensions enabled:

php.withExtensions (e: with e; [ imagick opcache ])

Note that this will give you a package with only opcache and ImageMagick, none of the other extensions which are enabled by default in the php package will be available.

To enable building on a previous PHP package, the currently enabled extensions are made available in its enabledExtensions attribute. For example, to generate a package with all default extensions enabled, except opcache, but with ImageMagick:

php.withExtensions (e:
  (lib.filter (e: e != php.extensions.opcache) php.enabledExtensions)
  ++ [ e.imagick ])

If you want a PHP build with extra configuration in the php.ini file, you can use php.buildEnv. This function takes two named and optional parameters: extensions and extraConfig. extensions takes an extension specification equivalent to that of php.withExtensions, extraConfig a string of additional php.ini configuration parameters. For example, a PHP package with the opcache and ImageMagick extensions enabled, and memory_limit set to 256M:

php.buildEnv {
  extensions = e: with e; [ imagick opcache ];
  extraConfig = "memory_limit=256M";
}

Example setup for phpfpm

You can use the previous examples in a phpfpm pool called foo as follows:

let
  myPhp = php.withExtensions (e: with e; [ imagick opcache ]);
in {
  services.phpfpm.pools."foo".phpPackage = myPhp;
};

let
  myPhp = php.buildEnv {
    extensions = e: with e; [ imagick opcache ];
    extraConfig = "memory_limit=256M";
  };
in {
  services.phpfpm.pools."foo".phpPackage = myPhp;
};

Example usage with nix-shell

This brings up a temporary environment that contains a PHP interpreter with the extensions imagick and opcache enabled.

nix-shell -p 'php.buildEnv { extensions = e: with e; [ imagick opcache ]; }'