Installing PHP 5.3.x on RedHat ES5, CentOS 5, etc

Some cases arise when we want to upgrade php and we do not want to affect any dependencies it has.

Obviously we can use YUM for this ;)

The step below will upgrade your php with all it dependencies to latest version. We have 5.3.1 at the moment.

To install PHP 5.3.1 (latest version) you can make use of a RPM repository maintained by Remi. We will cover here for ES5 stuff.

So first of all we will need to get the latest remi release

wget http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/epel/5/i386/epel-release-5-3.noarch.rpm

wget http://rpms.famillecollet.com/enterprise/remi-release-5.rpm 

rpm -Uvh remi-release-5*.rpm epel-release-5*.rpm

You now have the Remi repository on your system, however it is disabled by default. Obviously you don’t want all of your packages been effected by this repository, however to enable it for a specific package, run the following:yum --enablerepo=remi update php

Now you can just run 

php -v

This will give you the version of php.

You can now restart your server.

Enable SOAP on CentOS / Fedora

CentOS, Fedora comes with a really good tool YUM.

yum is a software package manager. It is a tool for installing, updating, and removing packages and their dependencies on RPM-based systems. It automatically computes dependencies and figures out what things should occur to install packages. It makes it easier to maintain groups of machines without having to manually update each one using rpm.

So we will use yum to install our SOAP extension. Which we didn't enable while compiling php.

First of all you must be logged in with root.

If you are not you can use su to jump to root.

Now type:

yum install php-soap

This is all you have to do.

If you want to update soap, use this:

yum upgrade php-soap

And to remove it use:

yum remove php-soap

It is far better to recompile php ;)