PHP Installation Appears To Be Missing the MySQL Extension

When installing WordPress on a new Linux VPS, you may get the issue “PHP installation appears to be missing the MySQL extension.” Because the MySQL extension isn’t available by default in many operating systems, you receive the message “Missing MySQL extension.” You will discover how to resolve this issue and effectively finish the WordPress installation by following this instruction.

If you receive an error about a missing PHP extension, don’t panic. If you are experiencing the following message when attempting to access the WordPress installation through a web browser, you are among the numerous WordPress users who encounter this issue:

Your PHP installation appears to be missing the MySQL extension which is required by WordPress.

Follow the below steps to solve this error:

Connect via SSH and Check the PHP Version

Ensure that you have a SSH access to the server. Using SSH, connect to your Linux VPS and check the PHP version that you are currently using:

php -v

Create Info.php File

Alternate way of checking the PHP version is by creating a simple info.php file in your public_html directory with the below content:

<?php phpinfo(); ?>

After creating the file, open your choice of web browser and access the file.

Update the Required Packages

In case you are running an Ubuntu VPS and PHP 7, then execute the following commands:

apt-get update
apt-get install php7.0-mysql

Restart the Web Server

Next, you will need to restart your Apache service for the changes to take effect, or in case you are using Nginx + PHP-FPM, then you will need to restart the PHP-FPM service.

Update PHP

If you are running PHP 5, run the below commands:

apt-get update
apt-get install php-mysql

Then you should restart the appropriate service for the changes to take effect.

Search All the Available Packages Containing MySQL

In order to search all the available packages that contain mysql, you can use the below command:

apt-cache search mysql

Or, if you are running a CentOS VPS that contains PHP 7 installed on the server, then execute the below commands to fix the error:

yum update
yum install php70w-mysql

Restart Apache

You will need to restart Apache or the PHP-FPM service if you are using Nginx + PHP-FPM as a web server.

If PHP 5 is installed on your CentOS server, execute the following commands:

yum update
yum install php-mysql

Then you should restart the appropriate service for the changes to take effect.

In order to search all the available packages containing mysql, you can execute the following command:

yum search mysql

After installing the MySQL extension for PHP, you can switch back to your WordPress setup. If the installation goes OK, the message about the missing MySQL extension won’t appear. You can then continue with your WordPress setup.

Steps to Access MySQL Error Logs