carl moonan | the dude abides

Working as of 2007/05/23 … if you are reading this & this date is very old then these instructions may not work as they do now.

To build PHP is pretty strait forward but like installing Subversion there is a dependency on a library called PEAR. Also PHP has a module that runs inside of apache and in this instance linked to MySQL. You can find instructions here to build and install Apache 2.2.4 and here for MySQL 5.0.41. You can attempt to install PHP without PEAR; if the .configure step fails just install PEAR as described below and redo PHP install.

Source code (http://www.php.net/downloads.php):
http://uk3.php.net/distributions/php-5.2.2.tar.gz

Install location on machine:

/usr/local/PHP/5.2.2/

Steps:
ensure go-pear.php has been run

curl http://go-pear.org > go-pear.php
sudo php go-pear.php


This will start an installation process. You can press enter to accept the defaults. You should see a menu after pressing enter twice. At the menu choose 1 to modify the Installation prefix to:

/usr/local/PHP/5.2.2

Once Pear is on the machine you are able to build PHP.

Steps:
download source code

curl http://uk3.php.net/distributions/php-5.2.2.tar.gz > php-5.2.2.tar.gz

unzip

tar -zxf php-5.2.2.tar.gz
cd php-5.2.2

configure

./configure --prefix=/usr/local/PHP/5.2.2 \
--mandir=/usr/share/man \
--infodir=/usr/share/info \
--sysconfdir=/etc \
--with-zlib \
--with-xml \
--with-zlib-dir=/usr \
--with-openssl \
--enable-exif \
--enable-ftp \
--enable-mbstring \
--enable-mbregex \
--enable-sockets \
--with-mysql=/usr/local/mysql \
--with-mysqli=/usr/local/mysql/bin/mysql_config \
--with-apxs2=/usr/local/Apache/2.2.4/bin/apxs

make

make

make test (please look for any glaring errors here)

make test

install

sudo make install

PHP should be built and installed to /usr/local/PHP/5.2.2/ and the apache module installed to /usr/local/apache/2.2.4/modules/libphp5.so we can now proceed to configure and test it. To make PHP available through apache we must update /usr/local/apache/2.2.4/conf/httpd.conf

At end of the LoadModule list add these lines

LoadModule php5_module modules/libphp5.so
AddType application/x-httpd-php .php .phtml
AddType application/x-httpd-php-source .phps

test by creating a .php file called test.php that is visible to the web server and ensure it contains this code:

// Show all information, defaults to INFO_ALL
phpinfo();

// Show just the module information.
// phpinfo( yields identical results.
phpinfo(INFO_MODULES);

Here is a build an installation script for the process described. Copy & paste it into a file. Make the file executable with chmod +x myBuildScript.sh

#!/bin/bash

curl http://go-pear.org > go-pear.php
sudo php go-pear.php

curl http://uk3.php.net/distributions/php-5.2.2.tar.gz > php-5.2.2.tar.gz
tar -zxf php-5.2.2.tar.gz
cd php-5.2.2
./configure --prefix=/usr/local/PHP/5.2.2 --mandir=/usr/share/man --infodir=/usr/share/info --sysconfdir=/etc --with-zlib --with-xml --with-zlib-dir=/usr --with-openssl --enable-exif --enable-ftp --enable-mbstring --enable-mbregex --enable-sockets --with-mysql=/usr/local/mysql --with-mysqli=/usr/local/mysql/bin/mysql_config --with-apxs2=/usr/local/Apache/2.2.4/bin/apxs

make
make test
sudo make install