PHP Upgrade/Downgrade

Submitted by brucelet on Fri, 09/17/2010 - 15:25

I have been told by one of my software vendors that our installed PHP 5.2.11 is too buggy to use. They are suggesting either to downgrade to 5.2.9 or upgrade to 5.2.13 or 5.3. I don't see 5.2.13 or 5.3 on your bleeding edge repository, so if I go to software packages and tell it to install 5.2.9, will that work without breaking stuff?

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Submitted by JamieCameron on Fri, 09/17/2010 - 16:00

That depends on where you get the 5.2.9 or 5.2.13 packages from. Unless they are compatible with the CentOS PHP packages that we provide, you will probably break PHP apps.

What exact bugs is your vendor seeing in PHP 5.2.11 ?

Submitted by brucelet on Mon, 09/20/2010 - 08:56

I have requested a description of problems from the vendor. It might be that he is just passing the buck on it. However, I do know that our other servers on cPanel are running 5.2.9 and do not seem to have the problem with that application. The only choices I see from your repository are 5.1.6 and 5.2.11. I cannot go backwards to 5.1 version, so is there another option than 5.2.11?

Submitted by andreychek on Mon, 09/20/2010 - 12:36

If your application requires PHP 5.2.9, there is always the option of manually downloading the version of PHP you require from the Virtualmin software repository, as the older versions do exist in there:

http://software.virtualmin.com/bleed/centos/5/

Of course, you'll need to keep in mind that older PHP versions may have security issues, so you'll need to weigh the security implications when using older software.

Alternatively, you could revert to the original 5.1.6 PHP RPM's by downloading them from the CentOS repository and disabling Virtualmin's "bleed" repo:

http://mirror.centos.org/centos-5/5/os/

Lastly, there are some issues in PHP 5.2.10+ that can be corrected by editing the php.ini file, and setting:

cgi.fix_pathinfo=0

You'd need to do that in the php.ini file for the domain that's hosting your application... that would be in $HOME/etc/php.ini.

You might try that first, as that can fix a number of compatibility issues that may arise.