PHP 5.4 on CentOS/RHEL 6.4 and 5.9 via Yum

PHP 5.4.16 has been released on PHP.net on 6th June 2013, and is also available for CentOS/RHEL 5.9 and 6.4 at Webtatic via Yum.

Update 2013-06-20 – Webtatic now has released PHP 5.5.0 for CentOS/RHEL 6
Update 2013-05-26 – CentOS/RHEL 5.x now supported.
Update 2013-05-18 – A new package “php54w-pecl-zendopcache” has been added, Zend Optimizer Plus opcode cache.
Update 2013-05-06 – A new package “php54w-mysql55″ has been added for use with MySQL 5.5 client library, whereas “php54-mysql”, is for MySQL 5.1 client library.
Update 2012-08-26 – APC is stable enough now and so the extension has been added
Update 2012-07-22 – memcache and xdebug extensions have been added
Update 2012-04-29 – mcrypt, tidy, mssql, interbase have been added back in to the repository.

PHP 5.4.0 adds new features such as:

Traits
Built-in web server
Array short notation
Array return value de-referencing
Finally killing off magic-quotes and safe-mode

To see what else has been added, check out the changelog.

To install, first you must add the Webtatic EL yum repository information corresponding to your CentOS/RHEL version to yum:

CentOS/RHEL 6.x:

rpm -Uvh http://mirror.webtatic.com/yum/el6/latest.rpm

CentOS/RHEL 5.x:

rpm -Uvh http://mirror.webtatic.com/yum/el5/latest.rpm

Now you can install php by doing:

yum install php54w

If you would like to upgrade php to this version it is recommended that you check that your system will support the upgrade, e.g. making sure any CPanel-like software can run after the upgrade.

Unless you know what you are doing, it is risky upgrading an existing system. It’s much safer to do this by provisioning a separate server to perform the upgrade as a fresh install instead.

There are ways to switch between PHP installations almost seamlessly, but due to the risks, knowledge and skill needed, it wont be described here.

Packages

Package	Provides
php54w	mod_php
php54w-bcmath
php54w-cli	php-cgi, php-pcntl, php-readline
php54w-common	php-api, php-bz2, php-calendar, php-ctype, php-curl, php-date, php-exif, php-fileinfo, php-ftp, php-gettext, php-gmp, php-hash, php-iconv, php-json, php-libxml, php-openssl, php-pcre, php-pecl-Fileinfo, php-pecl-phar, php-pecl-zip, php-reflection, php-session, php-shmop, php-simplexml, php-sockets, php-spl, php-tokenizer, php-zend-abi, php-zip, php-zlib
php54w-dba
php54w-devel
php54w-embedded	php-embedded-devel
php54w-enchant
php54w-fpm
php54w-gd
php54w-imap
php54w-interbase	php_database, php-firebird
php54w-intl
php54w-ldap
php54w-mbstring
php54w-mcrypt
php54w-mssql
php54w-mysql	php-mysqli, php_database
php54w-mysql55	php-mysqli, php_database
php54w-odbc	php-pdo_odbc, php_database
php54w-pdo
php54w-pecl-apc
php54w-pecl-memcache
php54w-pecl-zendopcache
php54w-pecl-xdebug
php54w-pgsql	php-pdo_pgsql, php_database
php54w-process	php-posix, php-sysvmsg, php-sysvsem, php-sysvshm
php54w-pspell
php54w-recode
php54w-snmp
php54w-soap
php54w-tidy
php54w-xml	php-dom, php-domxml, php-wddx, php-xsl
php54w-xmlrpc
php54w-zts

Opcode Caches

A precompiled PHP APC package is available as an opcode cache, which is recommended for performance reasons. It can be installed via:

yum install php54w-pecl-apc

Zend have now released Zend Optimizer Plus opcode cache as open source, and is now known as Zend OPcache. As it’s more actively maintained than APC, it has been added as a package to the Webtatic EL6 repository. It can be installed via:

yum install php54w-pecl-zendopcache

error_reporting E_ALL now includes E_STRICT

You may get a lot more errors coming out of your error logs if by default your error_reporting is set to E_ALL now without explicitly turning off E_STRICT. The default php.ini that comes with the PHP package turns this off by default, but if you are upgrading from an existing installation, your php.ini may not be updated, meaning this will likely be turned on.