Redhat – Installing PHP 5.2 on RHEL 7.1

downgradephp5redhatrhel5rhel7

We are planning to move to Amazon EC2 server. Our current server version RHEL 5.5 and PHP 5.2. We are planning to configure Amazon RHEL 7.1. Does RHEL 7.1 support downgrading PHP version to 5.2. I'm worried about downgrading all dependent packages.

Anyone tried downgrading PHP version?. OR do we need to setup RHEL 5.5 version only?

what are the alternative option available related to OS since currently upgrading PHP is not possible.

Best Answer

If you're going to use PHP 5.2, you could be facing a security risk as Michael noted. To help hedge against this risk, you could go with a vendor that backports security fixes into past PHP versions. For example, I think CloudLinux either does currently or is slated to backport security fixes into PHP 5.2 (CloudLinux is a RHEL / CentOS derivative).

If you want to improve security more on top of that, you could also use a good mod_security ruleset like GotRoot or Trustwave.

If you don't want to do any of that, you could compile PHP 5.2 from source - it's actually not that difficult to do, but I wouldn't recommend it as compared to the above.

Best case is you'd update the application like Michael suggested (I understand sometimes PHP apps are encoded and you don't have access to the source code, but if that's not the case, you should definitely consider it).

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I do not see why "this sounds too good to be true".

Considerinh PHP 5.2 was released quite a few years ago, the problem is that Redhat/CentOS are really late about that (yeah, I know, "stable" and all that, which means not updating anything except for security reasons)

Happily, some people stepped up, and did the job that had to be done : create the RPM packages that so many of us needed ;-)
Only thing there might be : it won't be "offcial" packages ; so maybe not OK with the policy of your system admins ?

Still, if in doubt : before using those on your production server, you should try them on a test server (if you don't have one, a Virtual Machine will do just fine), just to be sure -- and, also, to check that your application works fine on 5.2

On the other hand, you might want to try compiling PHP by yourself : it is definitly not that hard, and it's a good thing to know :-)

Upgrade Centos 5 tot PHP 5.2 or 5.3 [recommended way?]

The excellent Remi has the very latest PHP builds for legacy distros - I upgraded Fedora 6 to PHP 5.3 recently. Once you have installed the key as above, you can install PHP 5.3.1 like so:

yum --enablerepo=remi update php-\*

This will not affect normal upgrade/installation from standard repos, as "remi" is a separate repo and not active except for during this single request.

Best Answer

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Upgrade Centos 5 tot PHP 5.2 or 5.3 [recommended way?]

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