Make PHP 5.3.6

Hola buenas, se que es de madrugada pero no queria compartir la experiencia que tengo ahorita en linux, al tratar de generar mi propio compilado de php 5.3.6, resulta que tenemos plesk panel instalado y corriendo php 5.2, el cual fue un downgrade que hizo un amigo mio para poder correr zend optimizer, el cual es requerido por unas sitios web que tenemos alojados alli; regresando al asunto, encontre un articulo donde podia montar varias versiones de php para un determinado cliente como es este caso donde me toca trabajar con moodle en un dominio, y sin embargo la version 2.3 de moodle requiere si o si php 5.3 por cuestiones importantes ya que esta version soporta llamada dinamica a funciones de clases estaticas, mientras que versiones anteriores no soportan esta caracteristicas, entonces ahora me encuentro compilando mi version de php 5.3 que voy a usar para este nuevo dominio con plesk panel. A continuacion escribire la liste de comandos que usé, mas algunas enlaces de referencias que me fueron de mucha ayuda para resolver este reto. Saludos. Seguire actualizando este post :)


Two PHP versions linux Plesk HOWTO

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Few days ago i was exchanging emails with Parallels support. I was asking them to help me to setup two php versions on linux plesk server. After few emails they answeared me that it is not possible. It didn't help when i told them that i was using fastcgi on my own hosting server and that i was having 3 php versions configurable per customer. Nop... Their answear was 

Quote:

As of now there is no option available in the linux, where you can choose php as per the customers. Hope you are clear now. If you have any further help, feel free to get back to us. We would be glad to assist you further.

And, there i was, left helpless, without possibility to finish migration from my old hosting server to our new and shiny Plesk. I needed newer php version because php provided by my linux distro is 5.1.
So, i logged in to Plesk server and spend around 20 minutes planning how to intercept Plesk calls. And it is done.
For this to work you have to have php running as fastcgi (it is most secure way, so i assume that everyone is running php as fastcgi)
Here it goes:

1. ssh to your plesk server, download php source, unpack it and configure it

Code:

ssh yourserver -l root
cd /usr/local/src
mkdir php540
cd php540
wget http://www.php.net/get/php-5.4.0.tar.gz/from/at2.php.net/mirror
tar xzvf php-5.4.0.tar.gz
cd php-5.4.0

NOTICE: you HAVE TO USE PREFIX switch in order to have your new php installed inside one directory, for example:

Code:

./configure '--with-libdir=lib64' '--cache-file=../config.cache' '--prefix=/usr/local/php536-cgi' '--with-config-file-path=/usr/local/php536-cgi/etc' '--disable-debug' '--with-pic' '--disable-rpath' '--with-bz2' '--with-curl' '--with-freetype-dir=/usr/local/php536-cgi' '--with-png-dir=/usr/local/php536-cgi' '--enable-gd-native-ttf' '--without-gdbm' '--with-gettext' '--with-gmp' '--with-iconv' '--with-jpeg-dir=/usr/local/php536-cgi' '--with-openssl' '--with-pspell' '--with-pcre-regex' '--with-zlib' '--enable-exif' '--enable-ftp' '--enable-sockets' '--enable-sysvsem' '--enable-sysvshm' '--enable-sysvmsg' '--enable-wddx' '--with-kerberos' '--with-unixODBC=/usr' '--enable-shmop' '--enable-calendar' '--without-sqlite3' '--with-libxml-dir=/usr/local/php536-cgi' '--enable-pcntl' '--with-imap' '--with-imap-ssl' '--enable-mbstring' '--enable-mbregex' '--with-gd' '--enable-bcmath' '--with-xmlrpc' '--with-ldap' '--with-ldap-sasl' '--with-mysql=/usr' '--with-mysqli' '--with-snmp' '--enable-soap' '--with-xsl' '--enable-xmlreader' '--enable-xmlwriter' '--enable-pdo' '--with-pdo-mysql' '--with-pdo-pgsql' '--with-pear=/usr/local/php536-cgi/pear' '--with-mcrypt' '--enable-intl' '--without-pdo-sqlite' '--with-config-file-scan-dir=/usr/local/php536-cgi/php.d' '--enable-zip'

As you can see, my prefix was /usr/local/php536-cgi/
Choosing a prefix is a MUST because that way your new php installation will not interfere with older php used by plesk.

2. compile your php

Code:

make

3. install your new php

Code:

make install

4. create php wrapper
for example, let's say that you have a customer blabla.com that uses some newer php functions that don't exist in php 5.1. Let's call that customer blabla.com. For him we will tell apache to use our new php (5.4.0)

Code:

cd /var/www/vhosts/blabla.com/cgi-bin
mkdir .cgi_wrapper
cd .cgi_wrapper

now we will create new file and name it .phpwrapper

Code:

vi .phpwrapper

file content:

Code:

#!/bin/sh
export PHPRC=/var/www/vhosts/blabla.com/etc/
export PHP_FCGI_CHILDREN=4
export PHP_FCGI_MAX_REQUESTS=1000
exec /usr/local/php540-cgi/bin/php-cgi

let's strengthen our new files and dirs permissions and privileges:

Code:

cd /var/www/vhosts/blabla.com/cgi-bin
chmod 101 .cgi_wrapper
chmod 500 .cgi_wrapper/.phpwrapper
chown blabla.com:psacln .cgi_wrapper -R
chattr -R +i .cgi_wrapper

5. make apache aware of our wrapper
plesk offers a functionality of changing httpd setup per host. we will use that functionality to tell apache that for blabla.com it needs to use our new wrapper, instead of one provided by plesk:

Code:

cd /var/www/vhosts/blabla.com/conf

we will create file named vhost.conf

Code:

vi vhost.conf

file content:

Code:

RemoveHandler fcgid-script

    AddHandler fcgid-script .php
    
        SetHandler fcgid-script
        FCGIWrapper /var/www/vhosts/blabla.com/cgi-bin/.cgi_wrapper/.phpwrapper .php
        Options +ExecCGI
        allow from all
    

So, we have told apache not to use plesk php wrapper (RemoveHandler fcgid-script) and instead of that we have created a new handler for php files. When executing php files on blabla.com domain apache will call our wrapper and use new php that we installed

6. we need to reconfigure blabla.com domain

Code:

/usr/local/psa/admin/sbin/httpdmng --reconfigure-domain blabla.com

7. and restart apache

Code:

/etc/init.d/httpd restart

That's it. For every domain that needs some extra functions provided only in php versions newer than one provided with your plesk distro you can do steps 4,5,6 and 7 (replace blabla.com with your customer domain name) and that's all.

Adicional: A veces podemos necesitar instalar este paquete yum-install libtool-ltdl-devel

Problemas Con Cookies en Diferentes Archivos PHP

Que tal ya llevaba tiempo si escribir una entrada, bueno esta vez tengo la oportunidad de publicar para resolver un problema que tuve hace un par de dias en una aplicacion web que llevo desarrollando.

El escenario era este tenia mi pagina php multidioma pero necesitaba guardar una cookie del idioma que escogiera de un popup y recargar la pagina entonces cuano yo hacia click en el idioma llamaba a una funcion javascript y esta a su vez enviaba por post a un archivo que me creaba una cookie con el iso del idioma, PERO cuando la llamaba de mi pagina php era como si nunca se hubiese creado la cookie, bueno les escrbo un poco de codigo para ser mas claro:

setcookie("language_pre",$_REQUEST["prefix"],time()+86400);

con el codigo de arriba seteaba mi cookie y ciando la llamaba desde mi otro archivo php era como si no la hubiese ajustado. El DETALLE era que al final de la funcion setcookie() tenia que especificar la ruta "/" asi a mi cookie la volvia accesible desde cualquier lado de mi servidor. O sea el codigo correcto era 

setcookie("language_pre",$_REQUEST["prefix"],time()+86400,"/");

Espero les haya servido, con esto logre convertir mi aplicacion multiidioma! Saludos.