Install multiple PHP versions on the same system

[hakre]

I'd like to run a matrix build against multiple PHP versions on the same virtual machine.

For example, the commands are named php7.4, php8.0, php8.1 and php8.2 as when running on ubuntu 20.04 just on ubuntu 22.04 or on ubuntu 20.04 for the other php commands named php5.3, php5.4, php5.5, php5.6, php7.0, php7.1, php7.2, and php7.3.

Is there a way to use shivammathur/setup-php this way?

[hakre]

There is shivamathur/spc on Packagist which can narrow the gap on ununtu 22.04 already. Tested with php5.3 ... php8.3.

#	NOK	OK
1	php5.3	php5.6
2	php5.4	php7.0
3	php5.5	php7.1
4		php7.2
5		php7.3
6		php7.4
7		php8.0
8		php8.1
9		php8.2
10		php8.3

(this is documented behavior.)

There is also shivammathur/php5-ubuntu which allows to install PHP 5.3 - 5.5.

This rudimentary setup takes roughly 5 minutes running on ubuntu 22.04 and roughly 4 minutes running ubuntu 20.04.

[shivammathur]

GitHub Actions has no syntax to loop matrix variable for a single action and setup-php does not support installing multiple PHP versions in a single run.

You can run setup-php as one step after the other with different PHP versions in a workflow or use spc in a for loop.

[hakre]

Thank you for the feedback. Right now I distribute the installation across both installers, have not done yet much with extensions, so far this is stable and allows a little bit of parallel workload:

make -f .github/workflows/Makefile -O -j 2 setup
make -f .github/workflows/Makefile -O -j 2 phpLanguageLevels="5.3 5.6"
make -f .github/workflows/Makefile -O -j 2 phpLanguageLevels="5.4 7.0"
make -f .github/workflows/Makefile -O -j 2 phpLanguageLevels="5.5 7.1"
make -f .github/workflows/Makefile         phpLanguageLevels="7.2 7.3 7.4 8.0 8.1 8.2 8.3"