Howard Miller

php-cli and php-fpm are completely separate. If you install php in Ubuntu, you get both. But you don't have to. If you've done anything different then you definitely can't rely on 'php -v' at the command line to tell you what version of PHP you are running. You need to look at PHP Info within your Moodle site (or create a test script).

I'm not a fan of upgrading Ubuntu server. I always recommend creating a new instance from scratch and reloading your site from a backup. It's usually quicker and more reliable in the end. As you might be finding out.

I'm lost - you said, "php8.4 was installed as part of the Unbutu OS up from 22.04 to 24.04 and no package is the result". Was it installed, how was it?

Remember, 'php -v' tells you the version of PHP *CLI*. There's no reason for CLI to be the same version as php-fpm, so that's mostly irrelevant. 

 

The native version of PHP should work with Apache, "out of the box" with little or no configuration. So, again, what have you done (and why)?

So, I suspect a bit of a mess here

Ubuntu 24.04 (as far as I can tell) natively supports PHP 8.3, not 8.4. Why not just use 8.3 and make your life easier?

How did you add the repo for 8.4 (if you did)?

ZipArchive is part of PHP's Zip extension. The most likely explanation is that you have failed to install the extension. Could be as simple as...

sudo apt install php-zip

Those extensions you uncommented are only used by Windows. As you are using Ubuntu, they do nothing.