Upgrading the Zabbix backend from older PHP versions to PHP 8.2 or higher
RHEL7, Ubuntu 20.04, and Debian 9 (Stretch) are no longer supported by Zabbix, thus our upgrade recipe no longer includes any information about the upgrade path from PHP versions before 7.2 to version 8.2 or higher. Newer Linux versions already ship with PHP8.0 or higher, which means that when we are upgrading a Zabbix setup from Zabbix version 6 to Zabbix 7, we can upgrade immediately.
The PHP requirement for Zabbix 7 is different than it was for Zabbix 6, meaning that if we are running PHP 7.2, we actually have a mandatory upgrade to do before we can run the latest Zabbix 7 release. I also like to work in a future-proofing kind of way, so in this recipe, we will go over how to upgrade PHP 7.2 to 8.2 which is the latest supported version on RHEL8-based systems at the time of writing.
Getting ready
For this recipe, we will need our server installed with a RHEL8-based system, which will be running Zabbix...