Debian/Ubuntu frontend installation

Overview

Starting from version 5.0, Zabbix frontend requires PHP version 7.2 or later. Unfortunately, older versions of Debian & Ubuntu provide only PHP versions below 7.2.

Supported PHP versions by distribution

On stretch, jessie, xenial and trusty distributions, PHP 7.2 dependency is not available, and therefore Zabbix frontend 5.0 or newer cannot be easily installed. Considering this, zabbix-frontend-php package has been replaced with zabbix-frontend-php-deprecated package on aforementioned distributions.
The main difference is absence of direct dependencies on any php or web-server packages. Thus, the user can (and must) provide these dependencies on their own. In other words, installing zabbix-frontend-php-deprecated package on its own will not give you a working frontend. A web server as well as PHP 7.2 with its modules have to be installed manually (use PPAs / build PHP from source). We don’t endorse any particular method.

The official way of getting PHP 7.2 or later on older versions of Debian/Ubuntu is to upgrade to buster/bionic.

PHP modules required for Zabbix frontend are php-gd, php-bcmath, php-mbstring, php-xml, php-ldap and php-json.