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 --with-apxs2 --with-config-file-path=/etc --with-gd --enable-shmop --enable-ftp --enable-sockets --enable-exif --enable-zip --enable-sysvsem --enable-sysvsem --enable-sysvshm --with-jpeg-dir --with-png-dir  --enable-mbstring --enable-embedded-mysqli=shared --with-curl --with-mcrypt --with-mysql --with-mysqli --with-openssl --with-zlib --with-pdo-mysql

Run make and make install. If you had enabled apache apxs2 above, then it should have enabled the PHP module in apache. You may also want to add a custom php.conf file in /etc/httpd/conf.d/ with the following contents:

#
# PHP is an HTML-embedded scripting language which attempts to make it
# easy for developers to write dynamically generated webpages.
#
<IfModule prefork.c>
  LoadModule php5_module modules/libphp5.so
</IfModule>
<IfModule worker.c>
  LoadModule php5_module modules/libphp5-zts.so
</IfModule>


# Cause the PHP interpreter to handle files with a .php extension.

AddHandler php5-script .php
AddType text/html .php


#
# Add index.php to the list of files that will be served as directory
# indexes.
#
DirectoryIndex index.php

#
# Uncomment the following line to allow PHP to pretty-print .phps
# files as PHP source code:
#
AddType application/x-httpd-php-source .phps

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

UTF-8 to hex

There is basically NO good way.

http://www.tokyomuslim.com/2008/01/php-convert-utf-8-to-hex-codepoint-values-unicode-hexidecimal/ http://hsivonen.iki.fi/php-utf8/