Upgrading to PHP 5.2.2 on RHEL and CentOS
May 5, 2007 by Jason · 33 Comments
It's been quite a while since the last release of PHP 5.2. The article I posted on upgrading to PHP 5.2.1 was published back on 2/10/2007, just short of 3 months ago. That all said, PHP 5.2.2 has finally been released and it includes many of the patches that were submitted under the recent "Month of PHP Bugs" (formerly known as "March").
The spec file goes largely unchanged from my release of 5.2.1, although the source has been updated to 5.2.2 and one RH-supplied patch (#50) has been updated to reflect some of the code changes in this newest release.
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New PHP packages available by popular request
April 2, 2007 by Jason · 6 Comments
Since there have been a few requests for some of the less-common PHP modules (and because these modules are available in the 'centosplus' repo) I decided to build them and have them added to my repositories. The 32- & 64-bit repos now have packages for php-dbase, php-mcrypt, php-mhash, and php-tidy. A few dependencies for those packages popped up (such as libmcrypt, tidy, and mhash) so those have been included as well.
I've also received quite a few requests for a subversion binary package that will work with the newer version of httpd. I'm a bit busy right now, but I'd expect that I'll be able to get to those requests within the next few days.
Announcing the Utter Ramblings EL4 repository
March 14, 2007 by Jason · 33 Comments
If you're a regular reader of the site, you may have noticed the "Yum Repository" link at the top of the page. If so, congratulations, you're one of the first to try out a new service I'm offering on this site.
As it appears, most of the posts on this blog thus far have been how-to's on updating your RHEL & CentOS servers to use the newest versions of httpd, PHP, and MySQL. I'm still planning on creating those articles as needed, but only the source packages will be linked to the page. Binary releases for i386 (x86-64 coming soon) will now be available for easy updating through my brand new yum repository (and yes, before you ask, 'up2date' can read a yum repo).
I'm hoping that this will cut down on not only the effort required to update your systems, but also on the possible glitches that can come from updating a complex set of packages like PHP (where, with prior provided methods, you'd need to type out all of the file names that you wanted to install all at once, otherwise you'd have dependency issues with upgrading from an earlier release).
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Upgrading to PHP 5.2.1 on RHEL and CentOS
February 10, 2007 by Jason · 36 Comments
Well, PHP 5.2.1 was released on Thursday so here we go again. PHP 5.2.1 contains more than 180 bug fixes, as well as some performance improvements (official release statement). For those of you that like to stay on the bleeding edge, here's my how-to on upgrading to PHP 5.2.1 for RHEL & CentOS 4.
As I have done with the last few upgrade tutorials, I'm including the modified src.rpm at the bottom of this post. Compiled RPM packages are NOT going to be included as PHP RPMs are dependent on the version of httpd that you're running. If you didn't follow my Upgrading to httpd 2.2.4 how-to, my compiled binaries won't do you a bit of good. In any case, if you've followed any of my other tutorials, you're probably pretty familiar with the process. If not, read my how-to's on Upgrading to PHP 5.1.6 & Upgrading to PHP 5.2.0 BEFORE proceeding as they both contain helpful information about the process.
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Upgrading to PHP 4.4.4 on RHEL & CentOS
January 25, 2007 by Jason · 2 Comments
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.
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Upgrading to PHP 5.2.0 on RHEL and CentOS
November 30, 2006 by Jason · 47 Comments
With the release of an src.rpm for PHP 5.2.0 in the Fedora Core 7 development branch, I've decided to roll out PHP 5.2.0 as a test on a couple of our smaller forums that are running vBulletin 3.6.4. According to the changelog, PHP 5.2.0 has an improved memory-management system. With any luck it'll be faster than 5.1.6 and won't break anything in the process.
The procedure to build the PHP 5.2.0 RPMs for RHEL and CentOS 4 is almost identical to the one I used to install PHP 5.1.6 on RHEL and CentOS 4 so this is going to read very similarly to the original how-to. In fact, I recommend reading that post as well before you begin.
One quick warning though, PHP 5.2.0 is currently the bleeding-edge release. I do not recommend that you install it on your production servers without first testing on a development box to make sure that your applications still work as expected. I would also recommend that you build the PHP 5.1.6 RPMs as well, that way you can easily roll back if needed.
To start, you'll need three things. First, you're going to need 'root' access to your server. If you don't have it, even if you can build the RPMs, you won't be able to install them. Second, on most machines, you'll need to install a huge list of dependencies. Finally, you'll need the PHP src.rpm from FC7's development tree.
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Upgrading to PHP 5.1.6 on RHEL and CentOS
November 21, 2006 by Jason · 41 Comments
I spend a good amount of time on vBulletin sites. In fact, the company I work for owns about a dozen sites with a combined total of about 10 Million posts. One of the most common questions I hear, aside from "Can you help me optimize my server?", is "How can I upgrade to a newer version of PHP?".
While Red Hat's policy of backporting patches to provide a 5-year maintenance cycle on their OS releases certainly has its uses, it really does leave users without the benefits of using newer software versions. Newer software not only provides new features but can improve performance.
Thankfully, you don't actually need to build from scratch to upgrade an RHEL4 or CentOS4 system because srpms are available from newer versions of Fedora. If you don't know, Fedora is the test bed for future versions of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The remainder of this article is going to instruct you on how to rebuild the php-5.1.6 src.rpm from FC6.
There are three things you're going to need to upgrade your copy of PHP. First, you're going to need 'root' access to your server. If you don't have it, even if you can build the RPMs, you won't be able to install them. Second, on most machines, you'll need to install a huge list of dependencies. Finally, you'll need the PHP src.rpm from FC6.
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