Installing Composer on CentOS with multiple PHP versions

Question

I have multiple versions of PHP (5.6 and 7.2) installed on my CentOS 7 server.

Googling CentOS 7 Composer installation seems to have the same guide, just under a different blog with these steps:

$ curl -sS https://getcomposer.org/installer | php
$ mv composer.phar /usr/local/bin/composer
$ chmod +x /usr/local/bin/composer
$ composer -V    
Composer version 1.5.2 2017-09-11 16:59:25

However, this threw an error straight away. So I changed this command:

$ curl -sS https://getcomposer.org/installer | php

to:

$ curl -sS https://getcomposer.org/installer | php72

This now downloaded the file, however when I tried using composer -V (after the other steps) it throws this error:

/usr/bin/env: php: No such file or directory

So I vim'd into /usr/local/bin/composer to see the line right at the top:

#!/usr/bin/env php

I changed that to

#!/usr/bin/env php72

but doing composer -V now shows:

PHP Fatal error:  Uncaught PharException: phar "/usr/local/bin/composer" has a broken signature in /usr/local/bin/composer:23
Stack trace:
#0 /usr/local/bin/composer(23): Phar::mapPhar('composer.phar')
#1 {main}
  thrown in /usr/local/bin/composer on line 23

I tried the same with php56 to the same result.

How do I go about installing composer correctly on a CentOS 7 server running multiple versions of PHP?

Sidenote: lemme know if this is better for say ... superuser

Answer 1

It all depends on the version of php you would like to use. Could you please show us the error you get when you try to install composer with php56 ?

Anyways "php" is just a symlink to the real php binary, wich in your case seems to be pointing to php 56, to make sure of that do a ls -l on the symlink, that you can locate by typing

whereis php

So if you want the full chain to be php72, replace that symlink with a new one that will point to the php72 binary. Or perhaps you can use an alias :

alias php="/path/to/php72"

Answer 2

My overall solution was to do this:

1. Create an alias in ~/.bashrc: alias php="php72"
2. Then install composer with above steps without any amedments
3. Then go back into ~/.bashrc to add a new alias: alias composer_72="php /usr/local/bin/composer"

Now I have composer working on PHP7.2