Drush using different version of php than Drupal on hosted server

Short version: They don't support it, because their default PHP-CLI version is still PHP 7.4 server-wide, which reached end-of-life on Nov 23, 2022. 

Long version: They have other PHP versions available, but you need some hacks to get it to work, and they've already hacked their local /usr/local/bin/drush script to try and get it to work, but it doesn't with PHP8.1, unfortunately.

However, I managed to hack it into working with the following steps:

First, install your own local version of Drush, as their installed one is only drush v8.3.5 and D9/10 wants a current version like 11.4.o

composer require drush/drush

Then you need to edit your vendor/drush/drush/drush script and add the following line to the top of it to force it to run PHP 8.1:

#!/usr/local/bin/php81

 Then edit your ~/.bash_profile script and add to the end of it:

PHP_BIN=php81
export PHP_BIN
alias php=/usr/local/php81/bin/php
alias drush='~/www/YourDomain.com/vendor/drush/drush/drush'
alias composer='composer --ignore-platform-reqs'

then logout and log back in again or run source ~/.bash_profile to load the aliases.  This will remap your php, drush, and composer scripts to work the way you need it to.

This should work until the drush/drush composer package gets updated, and then you'll have to re-apply the first line to the script to get it to work again.

SiteGround tech support has said in Ticket 4363590 (if you want to refer to it) that they have escalated this to management, but it will probably be weeks before anything gets changed.   Considering their current installed versions of PHP and DRUSH, I don't expect much in the way of better Drupal support.  Even though they plug Drupal as one of their supported platforms, I got this as one of the comments from tech support:

As a hosting support team, we specialize in finding and resolving hosting-related problems. That said debugging third-party applications and/or developing code is not part of the standard hosting support we offer.

In this case, I recommended contacting your local developers and checking the Drush configuration with them.

So I wouldn't hold your breath on official support, but this should get you up and working!

Cheers,

  - Brian

Thanks for all the suggestions - they are working just fine.

Despite having PHP8.1 running in the CLI (and for the server), I'm now seeing the following error on Siteground when trying to initiate Drush scripts:

Fatal error: Composer detected issues in your platform: Your Composer dependencies require a PHP version ">= 8.1.0". You are running 7.4.33. in /home/customer/www/SITE/public_html/vendor/composer/platform_check.php on line 24 

I have changed my site's composer.json "platform-check": false but that doesn't seem to have prevented these errors.

EDIT: Had forgotten to tweak /vendor/bin/drush as in btribble's post.

I'm having the same issue with SiteGround running PHP 8.1 on bash.

Setting up .bashrc makes sense, and it's logical.

alias php='/usr/local/bin/php81'
alias drush='/usr/local/bin/php81 -d memory_limit=2048M [directory path]/public_html/[project name]/vendor/drush/drush/drush.php'
alias composer='/usr/local/bin/php81 -d memory_limit=4096M /usr/local/bin/composer.phar'

However overriding /vendor/bin/drush with "#!/usr/local/bin/php81" feels wrong, even with a patch.

I'm starting to realize that SiteGround isn't an ideal choice for Drupal.

I ran into this issue myself on a few projects that use shared hosting. As others in this thread have related, it's most likely due to support of Wordpress, an assertion backed up by numerous blog posts and articles. It's also unnecessary, since anyone keeping a Wordpress site current would have no issues running on PHP8.x. It would be the same as if us Drupal practitioners were pushing hosts to run deprecated environments in order for us to keep obsolete sites up.

@diamondsea has a good workable solution, which should be able to be adapted to many situations. For host-specific needs, it's best reach out to tech support to find our their pathing to alternate PHP runtimes for the CLI.

Did anyone ever figure out a way to do this without hacking Drush?

Agaric has an article on dealing with this issue—and I can vouch it works very well.

Essentially, any changes made to .bashrc, .bash_aliases, .bash_profile, .profile, etc. by themselves will have no effect on which PHP Drush uses. It requires a different approach to path to the PHP version you want it to run with. One way to set this up:

• Check with your hosting provider to find which versions of PHP are available, and their respective paths.
• On your shared hosting account root folder, create a /bin folder (mkdir bin)
• Create an alias to your desired version of PHP, like this example: ln -s /usr/bin/[your_php_verison] ~/bin/php. Make sure this matches what your provider offers.
• Test that the alias works by running: bin/php -v
• Add a path to your Drush site alias to link to this version of PHP in each environment like this example:

env-vars:
PATH: /home/[your account]/bin:/usr/bin:/bin

Once this is up, test it by running drush @alias st.

Hope this helps!

I have a Drupal site hosted by Siteground too.

I wanted to install a module that require php >8 with Terminal and SSH but the command php -v said I was in php 7.4.33.

But if you check in /usr/local/bin you note that there are stored also the other version of php

So I used the command php81 /usr/local/bin/composer.phar require etc.. to install the module in php 8.1 (use php82 if you prefer 8.2 version)

The php version choosed is used only for the single command.

The disadvantage is that from now on instead of just the composer command you will have to use always the extended one.

Hope this can help you

I'm using SiteGround shared hosting and I was struggling with the error:

Let me share the solution.

Here is my.bashrc:

# User specific aliases and functions
alias composer="/usr/local/php81/bin/php-cli /home/user/composer.phar "
alias php="/usr/local/php81/bin/php-cli"
alias drush="/usr/local/php81/bin/php-cli /home/user/www/example.com/public_html/vendor/drush/drush/drush"

(make sure to update the /home/user to your username and example.com to your site name)

If you modify the .bashrc make sure to run:

source ~/.bashrc

Add this string to the end of the root Drupal dir .htaccess file:

AddHandler application/x-httpd-php81 .php .php5 .php4 .php3

Also, adding this string helps after composer update command, because composer update replaces the .htaccess and the site starts to show the error "Composer detected issues in your platform".

If you are still facing the problem with drush updb try example.com/update.php instead.

Thanks to everyone for sharing solutions here! I recently looked at this task, and updated the Drush documentation page, with a lot of inspiration from this Forum post: https://www.drupal.org/docs/develop/development-tools/drush

I copy-pasted your awesome comment with a step-by-step set up for a symlink solution, which looks really interesting, so thanks for sharing it @karolus!