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matteo
Asked: 2012-06-17 04:06:04 +0800 CST

how do I update php on centOS?

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I have php 5.1.6 installed on a centOS server, and I need at least 5.3.2 (but would rather install the latest available 5.* version).

If I run 

yum update php

it says it will update to 5.1.6-34.el5_8 (mine is 5.1.6-27.el5_5.3)..... what the heck????

Are the available packages for centOS THAT much behind the current version, or is it because yum will by default only update within the subversion after the second dot (or something) and I need to tell it to give me a more recent version? If so how do I do that?

centos php yum update

4 Answers

  1. You are most likely running old version of Centos (5.5 or even earlier), which doesn't have PHP 5.2.x or 5.3.x in it's repos. You have 2 options: update Centos to a more recent version (5.6 is the first one with PHP 5.3) or use http://iuscommunity.org/About

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  2. Yes, as I recall getting a newer version of php on CentOs 5.x was mighty painful.

    Basically there is a php53 package in the updates repos;

    # cat /etc/redhat-release 
CentOS release 5.8 (Final)

# repoquery -i php53

Name        : php53
Version     : 5.3.3
Release     : 7.el5_8
Repository  : updates

    but if you run something like this;

     # yum provides php
php-5.1.6-32.el5.x86_64 : The PHP HTML-embedded scripting language. (PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor)
php-5.1.6-34.el5_8.x86_64 : The PHP HTML-embedded scripting language. (PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor)

    you will see that php53 package does not actually provide php, which means that installing it will break any packages that depend on php, despite there being a php on the system.

    In the end I used a shim rpm that just contained a single provides line, which I found somewhere on the web because all my php requirements were simple.

    The alternatives are as @c2h5oh mentioned, to use a 3rd party re-packaged version, (or to upgrade to Centos 6.2 :-< ).

    You can see what replacing all the php with php53 will break with the following command;

    # rpm --whatrequires -V php
Unsatisfied dependencies for pastebin-0.60-4.el5.noarch: php

    You can see from the output of that last command, that in my case I wasn't using any packages that require php that were important, so I just did used --nodeps to force remove all the php.

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  3. You can use yum shell to perform the remove (of php-*) and install (of php53-*) operations in the same transaction.

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  4. Use yum update, then yum upgrade to upgrade CentOS to 5.8, then retry yum update php

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