Upgrading PHP

webmasternovis

Hi all,

Currently I run PHP 4.3.10 but would like to upgrade to PHP5 on my server. I don't have a clue how to do this, so could anyone help or point me to some good tutorials?

Thanks,
Mike

bradgrafelman

I'm not sure if there's a way to direct "upgrade", versus a clean install (uninstall PHP4, install PHP5).

How was PHP4 installed? Did you configure it yourself? PHP5 will be setup in much the same way I'm sure (I haven't experimented with it yet).

What type of webserver are you running and on what operating system?

webmasternovis

Hi,

I'm asking on behalf of a friend, so I'm not sure of the exact details. I know its Linux, thats all.

I know he didn't actually install PHP4, the webhost did it for him...

stephaneey

There is no upgrade between PHP4 and PHP5, You'll just have to install PHP5. To do it on Linux, either:

You try to find out an RPM package and you just install it like this

rpm -i name_of_your_package

Either you download the PHP5 source files and you compile it/build youself.

In the 2nd case, you'll have to proceed to 3 stages:

configure (do a ./configure --help) to see all the available options
Make sure you dispose of the libiconv, gettext libraries. If you need simpleXML support, make sure you've got libxml2. By default, the configure script will try to use the zlib library. If you don't need it, just specify --without-zlib .

So, your configure command should look like

./configure --with-apxs[2]=[path to apache] --enable [what_ever_feature_you_would_require] --with-regex=system [--without-zlib]

apxs for apache 1.3 and apxs2 for apache2

after that, just perform a make and then make install.

siefkencp

I'm sorry to tell you but upgrading to php 5 in many Linux situations is nearly impossible, if not extrodinarilly frustrating.

I have been researching the upgrade for about 4 months and have found no real answer.

Myself I run RHEL 4 at work and Fedora (at home).

The make install option is the most promising because you dont have the dependancy problems you will get from trying the RPM's but getting PHP 5 linked with apache and recognized on your system can be a nightmare. I have heard good things about XAMPP but if you are locked into the default file structure (which my software requires '/var/www/html/') than that option becomes invalid. Additionally, installing multiple instances of appache and PHP becomes tedious and requires more configuration than its worth. Infact the only place I have gotten PHP 5 work is on an IIS server after a lot of tweaking.

There are alot of guides out there, but beware, the potential damage to your system may take a restore to fix.

To those who have acomplished this feat: Speak up! The community needs you.

Chris

stephaneey

Hello siefkencp,

It's not really a problem to make PHP5 working on most platforms. On Linux, I didn't encounter any problem when configuring and compiling PHP5.

The only thing to remember is that there is no upgrade between PHP4 and PHP5.

Everything has to be done by hand!

siefkencp

So how did you? How much did you have to remove of PHP 4? Every associated RPM with appache too? What about MySQL?

If you have done it, Please share in your experiance.

stephaneey

Well, actually I didn't remove PHP4. I'm using PHP5 as a module, so I just compiled the binary and the module version and I only load the PHP5 module into apache (loadmodule...libphp5.so...in httpd.conf). I've not played with mysql since I'm using SQLite, so there might be some troubles with mysql which I don't know about!

To conclude, I don't know if there are troubles with mysql but I know there is no trouble with PHP5 🙂).

You just need to make sure that some libraries are present. (libiconv, gettext, pthreads,zlib...)

The linux platforms I'm talking about are Suse and Redhat 9

snatches

Is there any place on my FC3 system where I can find what options I configured php5 with when I installed? I can't remember what I did and I need to re-configure with libcurl.

Doug_G

If you upgrade to FC4 it should update you to php5.0.4, at least that's what happened for me, using the Fedora distributed PHP not compiled from source.

If you look at phpinfo() it will tell you the compile options used.