How to fix HTTP ERROR 500 cpanel - laravel

Question

I am trying to deploy a Laravel application on a shared hosting but I am getting HTTP ERROR 500 when I try to access the web in the browser.

I have configured my index.php file, and my php version is 5.6.

Does anyone know how I can fix this?

Here is my error log:

PHP Parse error:  syntax error, unexpected '?' in /home/umugeoyw/umugabo/vendor/laravel/framework/src/Illuminate/Foundation/helpers.php on line 500

and on line 500 in helpers.php I have this:

return $factory->of($arguments[0], $arguments[1])->times($arguments[2] ?? null);

Answer 1

Your problem is the PHP Version. Laravel is using a Null coalescing operator here (??). Since this feature is only available on PHP 7.0 and later, your server will squark.

In your DevEnv you probably do have PHP 7.0 +.

You can checkout the docs here. From the docs:

The null coalescing operator (??) has been added as syntactic sugar for the common case of needing to use a ternary in conjunction with isset(). It returns its first operand if it exists and is not NULL; otherwise it returns its second operand.

PHP 5.6 is outdated anyways, so you really should consider updating! Btw.: Laravel requires PHP 7.1.3, which is clearly stated in their docs:

PHP >= 7.1.3
OpenSSL PHP Extension
PDO PHP Extension
Mbstring PHP Extension
Tokenizer PHP Extension
XML PHP Extension
Ctype PHP Extension
JSON PHP Extension

Hope this helps!