Painlessly run version 5.2.x and 5.3.x on the same apache port simultaneously.

Several persons have indicated that they could not get this working per my instructions below. For a more thorough explanation, see Chris Breidert’ s follow-up blog post. One of these days, when I get more time, I’ll go through a vanilla installation and add any additional instructions, etc.

I’d just upgraded to Ubuntu 10.10 on my PC. However, the default PHP package was version 5.3.x and I needed 5.2.x. Some projects needed the newest version, others would be crippled by it. While looking for a way to have two versions of PHP running simultaneously on Ubuntu 10.10, I struck success.

In this post, I’ll explain step-by-step how you too can  build a development platform where you can work on PHP 5.2.x and 5.3.x projects simultaneously–without ever having to restart Apache.

Why?

My primary development computer is a Macbook Pro, but sometimes I like to change things up and work from my PC installed with the latest version of Ubuntu (10.10 at the time of writing.) Ubuntu 10.10 (A.K.A Maverick Meerkat) comes with PHP 5.3.x (currently 5.3.3.)

While using version 5.3.x, I noticed that some of my development projects were broken (like my website that needs curl!) On the other hand, I have another development project that is “cutting-edge” and must run PHP 5.3.x. I couldn’t just downgrade to PHP 5.2.x (which seemed to be the bulk of solutions offered for my predicament.)

Switching versions is easy on my Mac, thanks to MAMP. I just swap versions through the MAMP control panel. However, I really wanted the same flexibility on Ubuntu. Not only did I find a solution, I found one that I prefer to MAMP because I can run either version simultaneously. Here’s how I did it.

Step 1: Get PHP source code.

Download the most current version of PHP 5.2.x (5.2.14 at the time of writing.)

http://us.php.net/downloads.php

You can download this to anywhere like ~/src or wherever. Extract it with tar xzvf php-file (for .tar.gz variant) or tar xjvf php-file  (for .tar.bz variant) depending on which version you downloaded. Change directories into the folder you just extracted.

Step 2: Install PHP development libraries.

Source code

sudo apt-get install libxml2-dev libmysqlclient-dev libcurl4-gnutls-dev libcurl4-openssl-dev libpng12-dev libjpeg62-dev

Credit to Dave Parrish for the dev packages and configure options, plus most of the other information here.

Step 3: Configure and make.

Source code

./configure --prefix=/opt/php5.2 \
--with-config-file-path=/opt/php5.2 \
--with-mysqli \
--with-mysql \
--with-curl \
--with-gd \
--with-jpeg \
--with-jpeg-dir \
--enable-cli \
--enable-fastcgi \
--enable-discard-path \
--enable-force-cgi-redirect

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make && sudo make install

Step 4: Setup fast-cgi.

Just install the Debian package.

Source code

sudo apt-get install libapache2-mod-fastcgi

To enable the module, run:

Source code

sudo a2enmod fastcgi

Restart Apache.

Step 5: Enable mod_actions.

mod_actions was already available for me to use. I simply had to enable it:

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sudo a2enmod actions

Restart Apache.

Step 6: Setup php5-cgi wrapper.

Create a /usr/lib/cgi-bin/php5-cgi file:

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#!/bin/sh
PHP_FCGI_CHILDREN=1
export PHP_FCGI_CHILDREN
PHP_FCGI_MAX_REQUESTS=5000
export PHP_FCGI_MAX_REQUESTS
exec /opt/php5.2/bin/php-cgi

Also ripped off from Dave Parrish.

Make your wrapper executable:

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sudo chmod +x /usr/lib/cgi-bin/php5-cgi

Step 7: Make an Include file for VirtualHosts.

I made a simple include file under /etc/apache2/ called php52.conf:

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#include for sites that still need to run at php 5.2.x
 
ScriptAlias /php5-cgi /usr/lib/cgi-bin/php5-cgi
 
Action application/x-httpd-php5 /php5-cgi
AddHandler application/x-httpd-php5 .php .php5 .php4 .php3 .phtml

Credit to jameso for this pearl.

Step 8: Include php52.conf in all VirtualHosts where PHP 5.2.x is needed.

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<VirtualHost *.80>
 
# ...
 
#needs to run version 5.2.x of PHP
Include php52.conf
 
</VirtualHost>

That’s it! Now I can simply insert my Include directive for any websites that I’m developing that are not ready for PHP 5.3.

Important. I am using VirtualHost configurations. This allows me to leave PHP 5.3.x enabled globally via the Apache module and turn on PHP 5.2.x specifically for each vhost. If you develop in the typical way of accessing a website via http://localhost/someproject, consider using the Apache Directory directive instead. It should work, but I haven’t tested.