Optionally upgrading the Zabbix backend from PHP 7.2 to PHP 7.4

RHEL7, Ubuntu 16.04, 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 7.2 or higher. All the newer Linux versions already ship with PHP7.2 or higher, which means that when we are upgrading a Zabbix setup from Zabbix version 5 to Zabbix 6, we can upgrade immediately.

The PHP requirement for Zabbix 6 is the same as it was for Zabbix 5, meaning that as long as we are running PHP 7.2 or higher, we can run the latest Zabbix 6 release. Nevertheless, I 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 7.4.

Getting ready

For this recipe, we will need our server installed with a RHEL8-based system, which will be running Zabbix server 5 with PHP version 7.2.

Another possibility is that you have a server running a Debian...