Upgrading to PHP 4.4.4 on RHEL & CentOS

Yeah, I know, some of you don't like PHP 5. Some don't like it because it breaks some of their (poorly written) software. Some don't like it because there aren't any RH-approved packages for upgrading. Some don't like it for good reason because PHP 4 is actually faster at many tasks when compared to PHP 5.0.x or 5.1.x (I'm stopping there, 5.2.0 is wicked fast for me). For those people, I'm going to toss this out quickly so that you have an easier time moving to the newest version of PHP 4 without compiling from source.

If anyone reading this uses the Plesk Management Panel then you're probably familiar with AtomicRocketTurtle. "Back in the day" Scott used to provide RPMs for PHP 4.4.4 on RHEL/CentOS 3 & 4. He has since dropped support for that version (unless you're one of this paying customers) but he's still got the src.rpm available for anyone. That src.rpm makes it very easy to upgrade your system to PHP 4.4.4.

Assuming that you've followed (or at least read) some of my other tutorials, you've probably got all of the dependencies filled. If not, just make sure that you've got a full development environment installed (gcc, gcc-c++, make, autoconf, automake, etc...). Any "-devel" packages you need will make themselves known the first time you try to build the RPMs.

The source package you need can be found in ART's SRPMS repository. The file you want is named "php-4.4.4-1.art.src.rpm". In the method described repeatedly in my other how-to's, download and install it. Once you've done so, run "rpmbuild -bb" on the .spec file (which should be in /usr/src/redhat/SPECS/).

Once it's done, you'll end up with a bunch of RPMs that can be used to upgrade your PHP install. Make sure that you update your PHP cache, Ioncube loaders, Zend loaders, etc. Because if you weren't already running 4.4.x, this will break them.