How to upgrade PHP Version 5.x to 7.x?

I am assuming most of PHP developers will be using XAMPP for their local web development.

If you are still using an old version of PHP and want to upgrade to latest version 7.x then you are in the right place.

Latest version PHP 7 has lots of improvement over PHP5 like performance has improved, low memory usage etc.

Lets see few improvments of PHP7 over PHP5 –

• Scalar type declarations
• Return type declarations
• Null coalescing operator
• Spaceship operator
• Constant arrays using define()
• Anonymous classes
• Unicode codepoint escape syntax
• Closure::call()
• Filtered unserialize()
• IntlChar
• Expectations
• Group use declarations
• Generator Return Expressions
• Generator delegation
• Integer division with intdiv()
• Session options
• preg_replace_callback_array()
• CSPRNG Functions

PHP Upgrade to 7.X

• Download the latest PHP version 7.x from https://windows.php.net/download#php-7.0
• Extract files in a folder named PHP.
• In XAMPP directory, rename your current PHP folder to PHP_Old and replace this with new downloaded PHP 7.X version.
• Open the XAMPP control panel and configure apache
• Click on config button and it will show various option to configure. Configure Apache (httpd-xamp.conf)

• Replace all PHP 5 text to PHP 7 and save the file.
• Restart the server.

Check PHP version now , it must be updated to PHP 7.x.