Build PHP 5.4 on CentOS 6.2 - Ben Ramsey

In case you haven’t heard the news, the PHP project released version 5.4.0 last Thursday. Naturally, I decided it was time to install and give it a try. I chose to install to a clean and bare-bones CentOS 6.2 virtual machine using VirtualBox. I did this for two reasons: 1) I wanted a clean environment for the build, and 2) I wanted to play with CentOS. At the time of this writing, there are not yet any official CentOS RPMs for PHP 5.4, so I had to build PHP from source. What follows are the notes I took during the installation and build process. I hope you find them helpful. Set up a CentOS virtual machine First of all, go grab the CentOS 6.2 netinstall ISO. Depending on the mirror, it will likely be located somewhere like centos/6.2/isos/x86_64/CentOS-6.2-x86_64-netinstall.iso (note that I’m using the 64-bit version). Following that, create a new basic VirtualBox VM (512 MB RAM, 8 GB HDD, 12 MB video RAM) for your CentOS installation (use “Red Hat (64 bit)” as the Version) and follow these instructions for a CentOS 6.2 netinstall. I chose the 64-bit version, using the netinstall URL of http://mirror.centos.org/centos/6.2/os/x86_64/. Since the VirtualBox video RAM selected is only 12 MB, it won’t boot into the graphical mode shown in the netinstall installation guide. Don’t worry about this. Also, it will make some assumptions (e.g. it won’t install Gnome or KDE), since you aren’t in graphical mode. What you’ll have at the end is a very bare-bones server installation. After installation, I like to power down the VM and adjust my settings to set up port forwarding so that I can shell into my VM from my Mac terminal. Feel free to configure things as you like. See the screenshot for an example of forwarding ports in Virtual Box. Once set up, you can boot the VM and then use your favorite local terminal to SSH to the instance: 1 ssh -p 2222 root@localhost You’ll probably want to create a user for yourself, so that you’re not using root all the time, but since this is a VM on your local machine, it’s not a huge deal. If this was a box out in the open, I’d recommend locking it down and creating a user with much more restricted permissions. Install packages needed for PHP Once logged in to the VM, you’ll need to install some basic build stuff, like gcc, etc. 1 2 yum install man wget yum groupinstall "Development Tools" Next, update iptables to allow connections to the VM over ports 80 and 8000. 1 2 3 sed -i '/22/ i -A INPUT -m state --state NEW -m tcp -p tcp --dport 80 -j ACCEPT' /etc/sysconfig/iptables sed -i '/22/ i -A INPUT -m state --state NEW -m tcp -p tcp --dport 8000 -j ACCEPT' /etc/sysconfig/iptables /etc/init.d/iptables restart For the PHP configuration that I’m using, install the following packages. There will be a bunch of dependencies it will ask you to install. Just say yes to them all. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 yum install libxml2-devel httpd-devel libXpm-devel gmp-devel libicu-devel t1lib-devel aspell-devel openssl-devel bzip2-devel libcurl-devel libjpeg-devel libvpx-devel libpng-devel freetype-devel readline-devel libtidy-devel libxslt-devel For some reason, libmcrypt isn’t available in the main CentOS repositories, so add the RPMForge repo to install it. 1 2 3 4 5 wget http://packages.sw.be/rpmforge-release/rpmforge-release-0.5.2-2.el6.rf.x86_64.rpm rpm --import http://apt.sw.be/RPM-GPG-KEY.dag.txt rpm -K rpmforge-release-0.5.2-2.el6.rf.*.rpm # Verifies the package rpm -i rpmforge-release-0.5.2-2.el6.rf.*.rpm yum install libmcrypt-devel Now, the environment is all ready for building PHP 5.4! Build PHP 5.4.0 All that’s left is to get the PHP 5.4.0 release package and build it. Choose a mirror closest to you and run the following commands to configure, make, and install PHP. 1 2 3 wget http://www.php.net/get/php-5.4.0.tar.bz2/from/this/mirror tar jxf php-5.4.0.tar.bz2 cd php-5.4.0/ What you want to enable and build into your PHP installation will vary, but here’s the configure line that I used for this build: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 ./configure --with-libdir=lib64 --prefix=/usr/local --with-layout=PHP --with-pear --with-apxs2 --enable-calendar --enable-bcmath --with-gmp --enable-exif --with-mcrypt --with-mhash --with-zlib --with-bz2 --enable-zip --enable-ftp --enable-mbstring --with-iconv --enable-intl --with-icu-dir=/usr --with-gettext --with-pspell --enable-sockets --with-openssl --with-curl --with-curlwrappers --with-gd --enable-gd-native-ttf --with-jpeg-dir=/usr --with-png-dir=/usr --with-zlib-dir=/usr --with-xpm-dir=/usr --with-vpx-dir=/usr --with-freetype-dir=/usr --with-t1lib=/usr --with-libxml-dir=/usr --with-mysql=mysqlnd --with-mysqli=mysqlnd --with-pdo-mysql=mysqlnd --enable-soap --with-xmlrpc --with-xsl --with-tidy=/usr --with-readline --enable-pcntl --enable-sysvshm --enable-sysvmsg --enable-shmop Assuming the configure script ran perfectly, you’re ready to make and install PHP. 1 make && make install Now, you’ve got a fully-functioning build of PHP 5.4.0 on CentOS 6.2! Trying out the build Now, that PHP is installed, it’s time to try out a few things. Create a simple phpinfo() script, make sure Apache knows to parse .php files as PHP, and start Apache. 1 2 3 echo "