Change Laravel Homestead v7.0.1 with php 7.2 to php 7.1

Question

What are the steps to downgrade the php version to 7.1 and make it default on latest Homestead 7, Homestead 7 comes with php version 7.2 as default.

There are a number of dev sites on my homestead I want everything to run on 7.1 by default, if I need 7.2 then I will use the following in my homestead yaml

sites:
    - map: homestead.test
      to: /home/vagrant/Code/homestead/public
      php: "7.2"

Answer 1

I think I have a better solution, to switch the php version in Homestead (I am using version 8 currently) running following lines of code switches the default php version.

sudo update-alternatives --set php /usr/bin/php7.1
sudo update-alternatives --set phar /usr/bin/phar7.1
sudo update-alternatives --set phar.phar /usr/bin/phar.phar7.1
sudo update-alternatives --set phpize /usr/bin/phpize7.1
sudo update-alternatives --set php-config /usr/bin/php-config7.1

Above line will switch the php version from any version to version 7.1 (Homestead 8 comes with php 7.3 by default).

Do remember to reload web-server (apache or nginx) after making this change.

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July 2020 UPDATE: In newer versions of homestead to change php version there are aliases like php71 php72 php73 php74 etc. to easily swith between versions