How to upgrade lower version to latest PHP version in XAMPP on Windows

It is not very complex but some time very essential when we need latest version of php for new project without changing the current local server settings.

so i am trying to cover the changing the version by keeping the old version manually.

PHP 7.0.0 is released on 3rd Dec. 2015. It comes with more strong features which I listing below:–

• PHP 7 is almost twice as fast as lower version of PHP
• Low memory usage
• Facilitates Error Handling
• 64-Bit Windows Systems Support
• New Spaceship and Null Coalescing Operators
• Enables Accurate Type Declarations
• Add Anonymous Classes
• Facilitates Imports From the Same Namespace
• Introducing null coalescing & Spaceship operator and more

Find more on http://php.net/manual/en/migration72.php

Now i am going to show how you will overcome this situation. my present php version is php-5.6.36

Step 1: First download the latest php version from http://windows.php.net/download#php-7.0 Download the VC14 x86Thread Safe or VC14 x64 Thread Safe deciding upon your Windows version( x86 for 32-bit and x64 for 64-bit ). Next extract the zip file in a folder named php.

Step 2: Go to your XAMPP installation directory and rename your old php directory with old version prefix like php to php_5_6_36. Now copy & paste the extracted new php folder to here.

Step3: Next, open httpd-xampp.conf from XAMPP configuration.

On PHP-Module setup section, comment these two lines and add the two lines below

#
# PHP-Module setup
#
#LoadFile “D:/xampp/php/php5ts.dll”
#LoadModule php5_module “D:/xampp/php/php5apache2_4.dll”
LoadFile “D:/xampp/php/php7ts.dll”
LoadModule php7_module “D:/xampp/php/php7apache2_4.dll”

That’s it. Now restart your XAMPP server and keep coding.