Information on install script for Debian 9

Hello,
i’m going to buy a second vps where i think to put debian 9 with virtualmin.
Some days ago i set up a vps for a customer with debian 8 and latest virtualmin and i see that virtualmin put a third parts repo for php 7.0 and 7.1
( The following PHP versions are available : 5.6.30 (/usr/bin/php5-cgi), 7.0.22 (/usr/bin/php-cgi7.0), 7.1.8 (/usr/bin/php7.1), 5.6 (mod_php) ) this is what i get in check config.

Does Virtualmin script and Debian 9 include the same third parts php version ? ( excluded the 5.6.30 wich is the debian 8 default )

Tried myself on a self hosted virtual machine.
For who interested on topic, Debian 9 installer install only php7.0 from debian repository ( and mariadb )

I haven’t had time to sort out whether we can get ahold of good PHP5 packages, or whether we even want to. I’m hesitant to add more PHP7 to the mix…simplicity has value and the difference between 7.0 and 7.1 is small.

I’d also like to gauge interest before investing more time on it (I’m still fighting with compatibility issues with old distros in the new installer). Is there a need for PHP5 on systems that have PHP7 by default? Most folks who ask for other versions want newer versions rather than old, so if we don’t need PHP5, I’d be happy to leave it out and keep things simple (it makes things easier for users, too, since they don’t have to know about all of the nonsense that goes into choosing and configuring different versions).

Hi joe, thank you for answer.
If don’t break virtualmin/webmin third party repo by sury seems good.
It can be an option for who have old customer php5 app, not the default.

Don’t know why but in a fresh debian 8 install i found the three version installed

We do install an additional repo to enable PHP 7 on Debian 8 (since it has PHP5 by default). Ideally, everyone would get at least one PHP7 version during installation of Virtualmin, but it still doesn’t work that way for Debian 7 (but all the rest of the distros do get at least one PHP7, I think). I didn’t think there would be two, though…I did switch to a wildcard to get some PHP dependencies and maybe that ended up adding both PHP 7 versions.

If it’s not causing problems, I won’t worry about it…I’d probably rather there were just one PHP7, from a usability standard, but once things are working I don’t want to touch it. There’s so much that is fragile about dependency resolution on Debian/Ubuntu, and changing one minor thing can cascade into multiple weird behaviors or missing dependencies.