PHP

PHP is a server-side scripting library.

Installation

The instructions here will enable you to compile (the latest version of) PHP for a prepackaged apache install. The trick is to have httpd-devel installed which will have the apxs2 binaries necessary to build PHP for apache. This is useful as PHP is not updated as frequently as desired for CentOS.

On CentOS (or any other RHEL based distro), run:

 # Install rpmforge repo
 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
 rpm -i rpmforge-release-0.5.2-2.el6.rf.*.rpm
 
 # Install all prerequisites.
 yum -y install make autoconf g++ gcc-c++ libtermcap-devel libgcc-c++ libtool gcc libpng-devel libjpeg-devel libxml1-devel libxml2-devel curl curl-devel libmcrypt libmcrypt-devel libtool-ltdl-devel libxml2.x86_64 libxml2-devel.x86_64 curl-devel.x86_64 openssl-devel httpd-devel 
 
 # Compile PHP
 # Go to the PHP source directory, then run:
 ./configure --prefix=/opt/php5 --with-apxs2 --with-config-file-path=/etc/ --with-gd --enable-shmop --enable-ftp --enable-sockets --enable-exif --enable-zip --enable-sysvsem --with-zlib --enable-sysvshm --with-jpeg-dir --with-png-dir --enable-mbstring --enable-embedded-mysqli=shared --with-curl --with-mcrypt --with-mysql --with-mysqli

Troubleshooting

PDOException : could not find driver

You need to have the pdo driver installed. In my case, I was trying to use the pdo-mysql connector which wasn't compiled with PHP. To fix this, install the PDO driver or compile it manually with:

--with-pdo-<driver>

In my case, I needed mysql:

--with-pdo-mysql