Excerpt
I had the same issue and this is how I was able to figure out how to run composer using a different PHP version on a shared hosting without breaking the system :)
Luckily, solving this issue with composer using different PHP version is dead simple.
Findings:
Default PHP was not run from /usr/local/bin or similar folder. Using the
which php
or
whereis php
would not give you the best answer.
Follow the short guide below:
First find the actual path to your composer binary itself.
On my shared hosting server, it was at
/opt/cpanel/composer/bin/composer
I believe most hosting providers using cPanel would have such path to composer.
Next, create an alias to the PHP version you want to use.
In my project, I needed php 7.4 or newer.
As mentioned earlier, the host was using cPanel and the actual default PHP version that the server uses is in the path /opt/cpanel/
You should see different versions of php in the /opt/cpanel/ (prefixed by ea-phpxx) for example, for php 7.4, it would be a folder
I had the same issue and this is how I was able to figure out how to run composer using a different PHP version on a shared hosting without breaking the system :)
Luckily, solving this issue with composer using different PHP version is dead simple.
Findings:
Default PHP was not run from /usr/local/bin or similar folder. Using the
which php
or
whereis php
would not give you the best answer.
Follow the short guide below:
First find the actual path to your composer binary itself.
On my shared hosting server, it was at
/opt/cpanel/composer/bin/composer
I believe most hosting providers using cPanel would have such path to composer.
Next, create an alias to the PHP version you want to use.
In my project, I needed php 7.4 or newer.
As mentioned earlier, the host was using cPanel and the actual default PHP version that the server uses is in the path /opt/cpanel/
You should see different versions of php in the /opt/cpanel/ (prefixed by ea-phpxx) for example, for php 7.4, it would be a folder called ea-php74 and for PHP 8.0, it would be a folder called ea-php80.
Now, be sure that php exists in a path similar to this:
/opt/cpanel/ea-php80/root/usr/bin
If you find php in the folder, then you can now alias it as folows:
alias php='/opt/cpanel/ea-php80/root/usr/bin/php'
Test that the alias is working by running
php --version
and check the php version as shown in the screenshot below:
Now, run composer as normal. For example
php /opt/cpanel/composer/bin/composer update
php /opt/cpanel/composer/bin/composer install
php /opt/cpanel/composer/bin/composer install
Remember how we found the composer binary at /opt/cpanel/composer/bin/composer. If this does not match the path to the compser binary on your server, use the appropriate one.