Is doable really a word?  I guess so, I don’t see it popping up as a misspelled word.  Anyway, I have been doing some development for some clients who had a desire for more functionality with the PHP install that BlueOnyx uses.  Well that is a complicated bag of monkeys, can of worms, box of cats?, or what ever, because BlueOnyx uses the installed version of PHP for the control panel, and it has modules that it needs to use that were specifically compiled against the CentOS 5.3 included PHP 5.1.6.  This makes things unusual when it comes to wanting to install a newer version of PHP.  These clients also wanted zip functionality, and they were specifically pointing to having it built with zip functionality, rather than the PECL based install, which was too foreign to me at the time to actually consider and present as an option.  PHP 5.1.6 or 5.1.x in general did not have built in zip functionality, as it seems that there was a bit of a drop out with the maintenance of the library it depended on during that PHP version’s time, so that made things even more complicated.  Staying in the PHP 5.1.x range might have been close enough for me to build as a drop in replacement without breaking the BlueOnyx control panel requirements.  Another thing to consider was that a drop in replacement might run into issues with a yum update overwriting it if done wrong.

So, this left me with few options.  One of the clear needs was to be able to have a different PHP install that did not disrupt the PHP version that comes with CentOS 5.3.    As I saw it, I had 2 options, build a custom PHP RPM install, or build PHP from source to be placed in a different location.  Building PHP from source is not as clean and easily controllable as I would prefer, but as long as good backups were made, it was worth a try.  One thing I have not mentioned yet is that we have ruled out PHP 5.3, as the changes seemed to be fairly extreme from the PHP 5.1.6 install, and the changes could be much more of a headache to work through than our client or many clients would like to have to deal with just yet, so we are focusing on PHP 5.2.10.

My first attempt was to built PHP 5.2.10 from source, but specifically building it to run from a different location, which I setup in a directory on the server as “/alt/”.  First thing first, due to the fact that in the source build and install step of “make install” does not really fully take into consideration any concept of installing in a different location, I needed to back up all of the RPM installed PHP related files.  To do this I ran the following:

for X in `rpm -qa|grep php-`;do tar cpjf $X.backup.tar.bz2 `rpm -ql $X`;done

This will iterate through the RPM packages that are installed that contain “php-” in their package name, and then backup all files listed in that package into a tar.bz2 archive, so that if anything gets overwritten or messed with that I did not want, I could simply restore by going to the root directory and then run “tar xpjf /root/php-*.backup.tar.bz2” (or wherever the backups are stored) and I would have all the related files restored.

Now that we have the backup made, I needed a good build environment, and with our base install of BlueOnyx, there are no development packages installed, or even a compiler (a BlueOnyx security decision).  So here is a list of packages that were installed to get things going, but first I would suggest doing a full yum update and reboot:

apr-devel-1.2.7-11.el5_3.1.i386
apr-util-devel-1.2.7-7.el5_3.2.i386
aspell-devel-0.60.3-7.1.i386
at-spi-1.7.11-3.el5.i386
audiofile-0.2.6-5.i386
autoconf-2.59-12.noarch
automake14-1.4p6-13.noarch
automake15-1.5-16.noarch
automake16-1.6.3-8.noarch
automake17-1.7.9-7.noarch
automake-1.9.6-2.1.noarch
avahi-0.6.16-1.el5_2.1.i386
avahi-glib-0.6.16-1.el5_2.1.i386
beecrypt-devel-4.1.2-10.1.1.i386
bison-2.3-2.1.i386
boost-1.33.1-10.el5.i386
boost-devel-1.33.1-10.el5.i386
byacc-1.9-29.2.2.i386
bzip2-devel-1.0.3-4.el5_2.i386
ccid-1.3.8-1.el5.i386
coolkey-1.1.0-6.el5.i386
coolkey-devel-1.1.0-6.el5.i386
cpp-4.1.2-44.el5.i386
cscope-15.5-15.1.el5_3.1.i386
ctags-5.6-1.1.i386
curl-devel-7.15.5-2.1.el5_3.5.i386
cvs-1.11.22-5.el5.i386
cyrus-sasl-devel-2.1.22-4.i386
db4-devel-4.3.29-9.fc6.i386
dbus-devel-1.1.2-12.el5.i386
dbus-python-0.70-7.el5.i386
desktop-file-utils-0.10-7.i386
dev86-0.16.17-2.2.i386
diffstat-1.41-1.2.3.el5.i386
dogtail-0.6.1-2.el5.noarch
doxygen-1.4.7-1.1.i386
e2fsprogs-devel-1.39-20.el5.i386
elfutils-devel-0.137-3.el5.i386
elfutils-devel-static-0.137-3.el5.i386
elfutils-libelf-devel-0.137-3.el5.i386
elfutils-libelf-devel-static-0.137-3.el5.i386
esound-0.2.36-3.i386
expat-devel-1.95.8-8.2.1.i386
flex-2.5.4a-41.fc6.i386
fontconfig-devel-2.4.1-7.el5.i386
freetype-devel-2.2.1-21.el5_3.i386
gail-1.9.2-1.fc6.i386
gamin-0.1.7-8.el5.i386
gcc-4.1.2-44.el5.i386
gcc-c++-4.1.2-44.el5.i386
gcc-gfortran-4.1.2-44.el5.i386
GConf2-2.14.0-9.el5.i386
gdb-6.8-27.el5.i386
gdbm-devel-1.8.0-26.2.1.i386
gd-devel-2.0.33-9.4.el5_1.1.i386
gettext-0.14.6-4.el5.i386
glib2-devel-2.12.3-4.el5_3.1.i386
glibc-devel-2.5-34.el5_3.1.i386
glibc-headers-2.5-34.el5_3.1.i386
gmp-devel-4.1.4-10.el5.i386
gnome-keyring-0.6.0-1.fc6.i386
gnome-mime-data-2.4.2-3.1.i386
gnome-mount-0.5-3.el5.i386
gnome-python2-2.16.0-1.fc6.i386
gnome-python2-bonobo-2.16.0-1.fc6.i386
gnome-python2-gconf-2.16.0-1.fc6.i386
gnome-python2-gnomevfs-2.16.0-1.fc6.i386
gnome-vfs2-2.16.2-4.el5.i386
gpm-devel-1.20.1-74.1.i386
hesiod-devel-3.1.0-8.i386
httpd-devel-2.2.3-22.el5.centos.2.i386
ifd-egate-0.05-15.i386
imake-1.0.2-3.i386
indent-2.2.9-14.fc6.i386
kernel-headers-2.6.18-128.4.1.el5.i386
keyutils-libs-devel-1.2-1.el5.i386
krb5-devel-1.6.1-31.el5_3.3.i386
kudzu-devel-1.2.57.1.21-1.el5.centos.i386
libacl-devel-2.2.39-3.el5.i386
libattr-devel-2.4.32-1.1.i386
libbonobo-2.16.0-1.fc6.i386
libbonoboui-2.16.0-1.fc6.i386
libcap-devel-1.10-26.i386
libc-client-devel-2004g-2.2.1.i386
libdaemon-0.10-5.el5.i386
libdrm-2.0.2-1.1.i386
libgcrypt-devel-1.2.4-1.el5.i386
libgfortran-4.1.2-44.el5.i386
libglade2-2.6.0-2.i386
libgnome-2.16.0-6.el5.i386
libgnomecanvas-2.14.0-4.1.i386
libgnomeui-2.16.0-5.el5.i386
libgomp-4.3.2-7.el5.i386
libgpg-error-devel-1.4-2.i386
libicu-3.6-5.11.4.i386
libIDL-0.8.7-1.fc6.i386
libidn-devel-0.6.5-1.1.i386
libjpeg-devel-6b-37.i386
libmcrypt-devel-2.5.8-4.el5.centos.i386
libmhash-0.9.9-SOL2.i386
libnotify-0.4.2-6.el5.i386
libogg-1.1.3-3.el5.i386
libogg-devel-1.1.3-3.el5.i386
libpfm-3.2-0.060926.4.el5.i386
libpng-devel-1.2.10-7.1.el5_3.2.i386
libselinux-devel-1.33.4-5.1.el5.i386
libsepol-devel-1.15.2-1.el5.i386
libstdc++-devel-4.1.2-44.el5.i386
libtermcap-devel-2.0.8-46.1.i386
libtool-1.5.22-6.1.i386
libusb-devel-0.1.12-5.1.i386
libuser-devel-0.54.7-2.el5.5.i386
libvorbis-1.1.2-3.el5_3.3.i386
libvorbis-devel-1.1.2-3.el5_3.3.i386
libwnck-2.16.0-4.fc6.i386
libX11-devel-1.0.3-9.el5.i386
libXau-devel-1.0.1-3.1.i386
libXaw-1.0.2-8.1.i386
libXdmcp-devel-1.0.1-2.1.i386
libXevie-1.0.1-3.1.i386
libXfontcache-1.0.2-3.1.i386
libxml2-devel-2.6.26-2.1.2.8.i386
libXmu-1.0.2-5.i386
libXpm-devel-3.5.5-3.i386
libXres-1.0.1-3.1.i386
libxslt-devel-1.1.17-2.el5_2.2.i386
libXt-1.0.2-3.1.fc6.i386
libXTrap-1.0.0-3.1.i386
libXxf86misc-1.0.1-3.1.i386
libXxf86vm-1.0.1-3.1.i386
lockdev-1.0.1-10.i386
lockdev-devel-1.0.1-10.i386
ltrace-0.5-7.45svn.el5.i386
mcrypt-2.6.7-SOL2.i386
mesa-libGL-6.5.1-7.7.el5.i386
mesa-libGL-devel-6.5.1-7.7.el5.i386
mysql-devel-5.0.45-7.el5.i386
ncurses-devel-5.5-24.20060715.i386
neon-0.25.5-10.el5.i386
net-snmp-devel-5.3.2.2-5.el5_3.2.i386
newt-devel-0.52.2-12.el5.i386
notification-daemon-0.3.5-9.el5.i386
nspr-devel-4.7.4-1.el5_3.1.i386
nss-devel-3.12.3.99.3-1.el5.centos.2.i386
openldap-devel-2.3.43-3.el5.i386
openssl-devel-0.9.8e-7.el5.i386
oprofile-0.9.3-18.el5.i386
ORBit2-2.14.3-5.el5.i386
pam-devel-0.99.6.2-5BX01.centos5.i386
patch-2.5.4-29.2.3.el5.i386
patchutils-0.2.31-2.2.2.i386
pciutils-devel-2.2.3-5.i386
pcre-devel-6.6-2.el5_1.7.i386
pcsc-lite-1.4.4-0.1.el5.i386
pcsc-lite-devel-1.4.4-0.1.el5.i386
pcsc-lite-libs-1.4.4-0.1.el5.i386
pfmon-3.2-0.060926.5.el5.i386
postgresql-devel-8.1.11-1.el5_1.1.i386
pstack-1.2-7.2.2.i386
pycairo-1.2.0-1.1.i386
pygobject2-2.12.1-5.el5.i386
pygtk2-2.10.1-12.el5.i386
pyorbit-2.14.1-1.1.i386
pyspi-0.6.1-1.el5.i386
python-devel-2.4.3-24.el5_3.6.i386
python-ldap-2.2.0-2.1.i386
python-numeric-23.7-2.2.2.i386
rcs-5.7-30.1.i386
readline-devel-5.1-1.1.i386
redhat-rpm-config-8.0.45-29.el5.noarch
rpm-build-4.4.2.3-9.el5.i386
rpm-devel-4.4.2.3-9.el5.i386
shared-mime-info-0.19-5.el5.i386
slang-devel-2.0.6-4.el5.i386
splint-3.1.1-16.el5.i386
sqlite-devel-3.3.6-2.i386
startup-notification-0.8-4.1.i386
strace-4.5.18-2.el5_3.3.i386
subversion-1.4.2-4.el5_3.1.i386
swig-1.3.29-2.el5.i386
systemtap-0.7.2-3.el5_3.i386
systemtap-runtime-0.7.2-3.el5_3.i386
texinfo-4.8-14.el5.i386
valgrind-3.2.1-6.el5.i386
xmlsec1-devel-1.2.9-8.1.i386
xorg-x11-fonts-base-7.1-2.1.el5.noarch
xorg-x11-proto-devel-7.1-9.el5.centos.i386
xorg-x11-server-utils-7.1-4.fc6.i386
xorg-x11-server-Xvfb-1.1.1-48.52.el5.i386
xorg-x11-xauth-1.0.1-2.1.i386
xorg-x11-xinit-1.0.2-15.el5.i386
xulrunner-1.9.0.12-1.el5.i386
xulrunner-devel-1.9.0.12-1.el5.i386
zlib-devel-1.2.3-3.i386

I know that is a lot of packages, but its better to have everything you might need there, just in case, and you can always grab the section from your “/var/log/yum.log” where you installed these, put it in a file called, for example “/tmp/devel-yum-packages.txt”, and then do an “rpm -e `awk ‘{ print $5 }’ /tmp/devel-yum-packages.txt`” to remove them all when you are done with them.  Next I downloaded the latest .tar.bz source archive of php-5.2.10 to “/usr/src/redhat/SOURCES/” and extracted them to “/usr/src/redhat/BUILD/” and configured it with this set of configuration directives:

‘./configure’ \
‘–host=i686-pc-linux-gnu’ \
‘–build=i686-pc-linux-gnu’ \
‘–target=i386-redhat-linux-gnu’ \
‘–program-prefix=’ \
‘–prefix=/alt/usr’ \
‘–exec-prefix=/alt/usr’ \
‘–bindir=/alt/usr/bin’ \
‘–sbindir=/alt/usr/sbin’ \
‘–sysconfdir=/alt/etc’ \
‘–datadir=/alt/usr/share’ \
‘–includedir=/alt/usr/include’ \
‘–libdir=/alt/usr/lib’ \
‘–libexecdir=/alt/usr/libexec’ \
‘–localstatedir=/alt/var’ \
‘–sharedstatedir=/alt/usr/com’ \
‘–mandir=/alt/usr/share/man’ \
‘–infodir=/alt/usr/share/info’ \
‘–cache-file=config.cache’ \
‘–with-config-file-path=/etc’ \
‘–with-config-file-scan-dir=/alt/etc/php.d’ \
‘–enable-force-cgi-redirect’ \
‘–disable-debug’ \
‘–disable-rpath’ \
‘–enable-inline-optimization’ \
‘–with-bz2’ \
‘–with-db4=/usr’ \
‘–with-curl’ \
‘–with-exec-dir=/usr/bin’ \
‘–with-freetype-dir=/usr’ \
‘–with-gd’ \
‘–enable-gd-native-ttf’ \
‘–without-gdbm’ \
‘–with-gettext’ \
‘–with-ncurses’ \
‘–with-gmp’ \
‘–with-iconv’ \
‘–with-jpeg-dir=/usr’ \
‘–with-openssl’ \
‘–with-pspell’ \
‘–with-regex=system’ \
‘–with-xmlrpc=shared’ \
‘–with-pcre-regex’ \
‘–with-zlib’ \
‘–with-layout=GNU’ \
‘–enable-zip’ \
‘–enable-bcmath’ \
‘–enable-exif’ \
‘–enable-ftp’ \
‘–enable-magic-quotes’ \
‘–enable-sockets’ \
‘–enable-sysvsem’ \
‘–enable-sysvshm’ \
‘–enable-discard-path’ \
‘–enable-wddx’ \
‘–without-oci8’ \
‘–with-pear=/alt/usr/share/pear’ \
‘–with-imap=shared’ \
‘–with-imap-ssl’ \
‘–with-kerberos’ \
‘–with-ldap=shared’ \
‘–with-mysql=shared,/usr’ \
‘–with-snmp=shared,/usr’ \
‘–with-snmp=shared’ \
‘–enable-ucd-snmp-hack’ \
‘–enable-bcmath’ \
‘–enable-shmop’ \
‘–enable-calendar’ \
‘–enable-mbstring=shared’ \
‘–enable-mbregex’ \
‘–with-pic’ \
‘–with-apxs2=/usr/sbin/apxs’ \
‘–with-mysqli’ \
‘–with-mcrypt’ \

Then I just ran a “make all” and then a “make install” which got most of the files installed the way I wanted them to be, but not all of them, so I quickly restored the backups I had just created, as it replaced the old “/etc/httpd/libexec/modules/libphp5.so” and messed with the PEAR install.  It also messed with the original httpd.conf, so to undo that, I ran “cat /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf.bak > /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf” to get it back, it created the .bak with the “make install” command.  All in all, this process worked, but it was dirty, and I felt dirty for doing it.

After a quick shower, so I felt a little cleaner after such a dirty install method, I looked at it again.  There had to be a better way.  I had tested and shown that there is potential in taking some updated RPM files I found on “http://dev.centos.org/centos/5/testing/i386/” and installing them in “/alt/” with the use of rpm2cpio, and then modifying the httpd startup script so that it set the “PHPRC=” environment variable so that PHP would look for the php.ini file in a different location.  But there were complications with that which I had not fully overcame.  The BlueOnyx control panel uses the same apache binary and PHP binary and modules, but it uses its own apache configuration file, php.ini file, and its own init script to start it up and set specific environment variables such as “PHPRC=/etc/admserv”.  It however still uses the “/etc/php.d/” directory to setup its included modules, and that was a complication I needed to avoid.  So, the only cleaner choice was to find a source RPM that I can extract and modify a bit, and then build a custom set of RPM files that I can use to rpm2cpio to the “/alt/” directory.

The closest starting point to building my own RPM files seemed to be here “http://dev.centos.org/centos/5/testing/SRPMS/php-5.2.9-2.el5.centos.src.rpm”.  It was only slightly off from what I was looking for, I was so happy to find that to work with.  I have not worked much with building my own RPMs before, so in my time frame, I could not really toss a spec file and patches together from the ground up to build my own custom RPMs.  So to get this going, I installed the source RPM file, and opened up the php.spec to see what I had to work with.  It seemed fairly strait forward.  All I had to do was download the newer .tar.bz2 source, and change a few version strings, and then find and modify where PHP will look for the php.d directory.  So up near the top, I changed the PHP version of 5.2.9 to 5.2.10, then searched for “–with-config-file-scan-dir=” and changed that to the hard coded “/alt/etc/php.d” location that it needed to be.  Then for completeness sake, I added information to the changelog:

* Thu Aug 28 2009 Jonathan Kinney <jonathankinneydss@google.com> 5.2.10-1.el5
– update to 5.2.10
– add mcrypt

Then to build it, while in the “/usr/src/redhat” directory, I ran “rpmbuild -bb SPECS/php-BlueOnyx.spec”.  Oh, yeah, and to make sure that I made it unique enough, I change the “Release:” to be “BlueOnyx%{?dist}” and then I renamed the spec file.  I wanted to keep it simple enough that I could also build updated RPMs for a plain old install of CentOS 5.3 without BlueOnyx installed.

One thing I am not going to explain the details about here is the adding of mcrypt, it took a lot of hacking to get in there, basing it off of the format of the other modules already built, and taking examples from the source RPM of the 5.1.6 PHP extras, which included mcrypt.  It was requested enough by clients that I wanted to take the extra time and make sure I got that in there.

The only steps left after the successful building of all those RPM files was to install it.  I just copied a, similar to what is already installed, set of the newly built RPM files to “/root/RPMS/” and then I went to the “/alt/” directory and ran the following command to get the files extracted:

for X in `ls /root/RPMS/`;do rpm2cpio /root/RPMS/$X | cpio -idmv;done

Then in the “/etc/php.ini” file, I changed the “extension_dir = ” to the new location of “/alt/usr/lib/php/modules/”.  The only configuration change left to do is to edit “/etc/httpd/conf.d/php.conf” and change the “LoadModule php5_module” to point to “/alt/usr/lib/httpd/modules/libphp5.so”.  After restarting httpd, I was up and running with a fully featured installation of PHP 5.2.10, without a single related error logged.  It is fully connected to the PHP settings that are set from the BlueOnyx control panel as it uses “/etc/php.ini”, but it gets its module includes loaded from “/alt/etc/php.d/” and the modules themselves loaded from “/alt/usr/lib/php/modules/”.  I have been running things on this very server that you are pulling this website up from, for nearing a week, without problems.

Once again, I have to plug my hwVPS account running BlueOnyx, which is the only VPS account that I have used that is so seamless, I have yet to run into any issues that would bring me to want more than this type of Xen VPS.