How to install multiple versions of php on redhat

Question

We have a legacy web application running php 5.4.10 and another application running the latest version of php ver 7.1

We would like to host both of these applications using apache on one instance of a redhat 7.3 server.

Here are the virtual hosts configured for each web app:

<VirtualHost *:80> DocumentRoot /var/www/app1.local.com/public_html ServerName www.app1.local.com ServerAlias app1.local.com ErrorLog /etc/var/www/app1.local.com/error.log CustomLog /var/www/app1.local.com/requests.log </VirtualHost> <VirtualHost *:80> DocumentRoot /var/www/app2.local.com/public_html ServerName www.app2.local.com ServerAlias app2.local.com ErrorLog /etc/var/www/app2.local.com/error.log CustomLog /var/www/app2.local.com/requests.log </VirtualHost> 

According to this guide: https://webtatic.com/packages/php71/ I know I can use "sudo yum install php71w php71w-mysql" to install the latest version of php and get app 2 working, but how can I also install php ver 5.4.10, and configure app1 to use php version 5.4.10? What are the steps?

Forgive me if the question seems silly, I'm more or less new to linux. I haven't been able to find a reliable and up to date tutorial explaining how to get this done.

Answer 1

You can try using docker for this, but you may need to have it installed on your machine first. Then you can try

sudo docker run --name=myphp5 -p 8080:80 -v /var/www/html/:/var/www/html -d eboraas/apache-php 

This will download eboraas/apache-php docker image and run a docker container named "myphp5" with apache/php5 installed in it. The -v switch will mount your local /var/www/html directory into the container's /var/www/html and it will expose apache on port 8080 (so it doesn't clash with your local apache running at 80).

You can stop the container by running

sudo docker stop myphp5 

Similarly, you can start it by running

sudo docker start myphp5 

To check the status of all your containers, you can run

docker ps -a 

Please note that there are other images with apache/php5 on dockerhub which you can use for this purpose - https://hub.docker.com/search/?isAutomated=0&isOfficial=0&page=1&pullCount=0&q=php5&starCount=0

The only limitation of this approach is that each docker container needs to expose the http on a different port so you can't have them running on 80. This is however solvable by using the local apache (the one listening on port 80) as a reverse proxy for the docker based apache.

Answer 2

Software Collections are ideal for this. The official description says:

Software collections allow you to concurrently install multiple versions of the same software components on your system. Packages built using software collections do not overwrite the versions included with Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

The current version, RHSCL 2.3, provides packages with PHP 5.6 and 7.0. See the Installation chapter of the RHSCL Release Notes to learn how to get access to RHSCL repos and install the packages.

See Apache with various PHP versions, using SCL on the RH Developer Blog for instructions on how to use the different installed SCL versions of PHP with one Apache server. (Note that the instructions assume RHEL6, but the same method works on RHEL7 as well -- just skip the installation advice.)