Upgrading PHP Version on Ubuntu 14.04

Once it was necessary to upgrade the version of PHP 5.5.9 to 5.6 on Ubuntu Server 14.04 LTS, the usual update of the system components did not help:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade

You can try to upgrade the system to 16.04 or higher as I described in the article Updating Ubuntu 14.04 to 16.04. Together with the system will be updated and PHP.

If the system update fails, you can add a third-party source with PHP:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ondrej/php
sudo apt-get update

And install the correct version from it, for example PHP 5.6:

sudo apt-get install php5.6 php5.6-mbstring php5.6-mcrypt php5.6-mysql php5.6-xml

Since there are several installed versions, disable the old version and activate the installed one:

sudo a2dismod php5
sudo a2enmod php5.6
sudo service apache2 restart

Similarly, you can install PHP 7.2:

sudo apt-get install php7.2
sudo a2dismod php5.6
sudo a2enmod php7.2
sudo service apache2 restart

Or PHP 7.0:

sudo apt-get install php7.0
sudo a2dismod php7.2
sudo a2enmod php7.0
sudo service apache2 restart