Even though it’s easier to use yum, sometimes we need to compile PHP from source code. Below I’ll describe a method for compiling PHP 5.4.3 on CentOS, this works both on 5.x and 6.x and all the dependencies (except for PHP itself, of course ) will be retrieved via yum.

After a fresh install of CentOS, we will need the wget binary, if you don’t already have it, get it with yum.

yum install wget -y

For some of the dependencies to get installed, we’ll need the rpmforge repository, so let’s add it.

wget http://packages.sw.be/rpmforge-release/rpmforge-release-0.5.2-2.el5.rf.x86_64.rpm
rpm --import http://apt.sw.be/RPM-GPG-KEY.dag.txt
rpm -K rpmforge-release-0.5.2-2.el5.rf.*.rpm
rpm -i rpmforge-release-0.5.2-2.el5.rf.*.rpm

Now let’s install the dependencies for our PHP compilation. Keep in mind that these are only for the configuration I’ll describe below, if you use a different compilation, you’ll need to get different packages. Also keep in mind that here I’ll only download the x86_64 packages, if you’re using a different architecture, just delete the x86_64 on every package name that contains it. The reason I specifically used that notation is to avoid downloading i386 packages, which is unnecessary but yum insists on downloading anyway.

yum install gcc make automake autoconf perl.x86_64 httpd-devel.x86_64 libxml2-devel.x86_64 openssl-devel.x86_64 pcre-devel.x86_64 bzip2-devel.x86_64 curl-devel.x86_64 enchant-devel.x86_64 libjpeg-devel.x86_64 libpng-devel.x86_64 libXpm-devel.x86_64 freetype-devel.x86_64 gmp-devel.x86_64 libicu-devel.x86_64 gcc-c++ libmcrypt-devel.x86_64 postgresql-devel.x86_64 aspell-devel.x86_64 libedit-devel.x86_64 recode-devel.x86_64 net-snmp-devel.x86_64 libtidy-devel.x86_64 libxslt-devel.x86_64 libcurl-devel.x86_64 libtool-ltdl-devel.x86_64 -y

Now let’s download the php 5.4.3 source code.

wget http://tr.php.net/get/php-5.4.3.tar.gz/from/this/mirror
tar xvzf php-5.4.3.tar.gz
cd php-5.4.3

We can start the configure-make-make install trio now.

./configure  --with-apxs2=/usr/sbin/apxs --build=x86_64-redhat-linux-gnu --host=x86_64-redhat-linux-gnu --target=x86_64-redhat-linux-gnu --program-prefix= --prefix=/usr --exec-prefix=/usr --bindir=/usr/bin --sbindir=/usr/sbin --sysconfdir=/etc --datadir=/usr/share --includedir=/usr/include --libdir=/usr/lib64 --libexecdir=/usr/libexec --localstatedir=/var --sharedstatedir=/var/lib --mandir=/usr/share/man --infodir=/usr/share/info --cache-file=../config.cache --with-libdir=lib64 --with-config-file-path=/etc --with-config-file-scan-dir=/etc/php.d --disable-debug --with-pic --disable-rpath --with-bz2 --with-freetype-dir=/usr --with-png-dir=/usr --with-xpm-dir=/usr --enable-gd-native-ttf --without-gdbm --with-gettext --with-gmp --with-iconv --with-jpeg-dir=/usr --with-openssl --with-pcre-regex=/usr --with-zlib --with-layout=GNU --enable-exif --enable-ftp --enable-sockets --enable-sysvsem --enable-sysvshm --enable-sysvmsg --with-kerberos --enable-shmop --enable-calendar --with-libxml-dir=/usr --enable-xml --enable-pcntl --with-imap-ssl --enable-mbregex --enable-bcmath=shared --enable-dba=shared --with-db4=/usr --with-xmlrpc=shared --with-mysql --with-mysqli --enable-dom=shared --with-pgsql --enable-wddx=shared --with-snmp=shared,/usr --enable-soap=shared --with-xsl=shared,/usr --enable-xmlreader=shared --enable-xmlwriter=shared --with-curl --enable-json --enable-zip=shared --without-readline --with-libedit --with-pspell=shared --enable-phar=shared --with-tidy=shared,/usr --enable-sysvmsg=shared --enable-sysvshm=shared --enable-sysvsem=shared --enable-posix=shared --enable-fileinfo=shared --enable-intl=shared --with-icu-dir=/usr --with-enchant=shared,/usr --with-recode=shared,/usr --enable-mbstring --with-mcrypt --with-gd
make
make install

Now we have php installed.

Further we can configure the basic steps of Apache.
Edit your httpd.conf file : /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf
Find the line that says AddType application/x-tar .tgz Append these two lines below it.

AddType application/x-httpd-php .php
AddType application/x-httpd-php-source .phps

Also we should tell apache that index.php is an index file (or whatever index you want), so update your DirectoryIndex as following :

DirectoryIndex index.html index.html.var index.php index.htm

copy php.ini-production to /etc/php.ini and edit the file based on your performance requirements, please have a look at our security pages to secure your php configuration from the link.

Some suggestions: Increase upload limit, raise memory_limit to 256M and set date.timezone to your location, in our case it is:

date.timezone = Europe/Istanbul

After saving and exiting the httpd.conf file, restart your Apache services. ( service httpd restart )

Now you have /var/www/html as your default web home root, and PHP 5.4.3 running on it.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *