LibreNMS recently moved the minimum PHP version to 7.1.3, with 7.2 recommended. There were some examples of how to do that with Ubuntu 16.04, but after doing so a few things also had to be done. First, there were a bunch of php modules that needed to updated to the 7.2 versions. Second, a little less obvious to me, you have to specifically enable the php7.2 module in apache and disable the 7.0 (in my case) module. I did this by:
sudo a2dismod php7.0
sudo a2enmod php7.2
Make sure to re-run validate.php afterwards....