I recently had to migrate a client from PHP 4.3.9 to 5.2 on a godaddy virtual dedicated server running Cent OS4, and I came across a fantastic guide for doing so:

http://www.jasonlitka.com/2006/11/30/upgrading-php-520-rhel-centos/

Unfortunately, I ran into a couple of problems with that guide, including broken links to a couple of RPMS and source packages that I corrected with forum searches and from the author’s other posts, which are all fantastic. That is a great site, and Jason should be commended for his commitment to helping people do what they need to on Linux Servers.

I have assembled here the steps I took to upgrade, aggregating the information I got from Jason’s site as well as the filling in I had to do.
So, without further ado, here are the steps I took:

1) Log into the server as root

2) mkdir /usr/src/redhat

3) chmod 777 -R /usr/src/redhat

4) yum install wget nano make autoconf automake rpm-build postfix fileutils file libtool gcc cpp gcc-c++ perl-DBI readline-devel libc-client-devel libstdc++-devel bzip2-devel curl-devel db4-devel expat-devel gmp-devel aspell-devel httpd-devel libjpeg-devel libpng-devel pam-devel openssl-devel sqlite-devel zlib-devel pcre-devel krb5-devel cyrus-sasl-devel openldap-devel postgresql-devel unixODBC-devel libxml2-devel net-snmp-devel libxslt-devel libxml2-devel expat-devel ncurses-devel gd-devel freetype-devel

5) wget http://www.jasonlitka.com/media/files/SRPMS/php-5.2.3-jason.2.src.rpm

6) rpm -ivh php-5.2.0-8.src.rpm

7) rpm -ivh php-pear-1.4.9-4.src.rpm

8) wget http://mirrors.kernel.org/fedora/core/6/source/SRPMS/pcre-6.6-1.1.src.rpm

9) rpm -ivh pcre-6.6-1.1.src.rpm

10) cd /usr/src/redhat/SPEC

11) rpmbuild pcre.spec

12)  cd /usr/src/redhat/RPMS/i386

13) rpm -Uvh pcre*

14) cd /usr/src/redhat/SPECS

15) pmbuild -bb php.spec

16) cd /usr/src/redhat/RPMS

17) rpm -Uvh php*rpm

At this point, php installed for me fine and dandy. Next, I updated the php.ini file to reflect the new modules directory, which was /usr/lib/php4 to the 5 version, which is /usr/lib/php/modules

Then I restarted apache to reflect the changes

18) /usr/sbin/apachectl -k graceful

After that, I just checked to make sure it had installed appropriately, and that mysql was working

19) php -v (Should display 5.2.3 for the version of PHP)

You can create a php file to check for the existence of mysql_connect() as I did, or you can create a file that actually connects to your database. Either one proves out the ability to connect to MySQL from your PHP installation.

Great big hat-tip to Jason Litka of http://jasonlitka.com for his doing the heavy lifting on most of this. The only things I had a problem with when following his guide were the PCRE version (it kept asking for >= 6.6) and a broken link to the php 5.2.2 source rpm on mirrors.kernel.org, which he fixed in this post on upgrading to 5.2.3 by providing his own source package.

Hope this helps anyone stuck with an outdated PHP version who wants to use actual object-oriented code and json functions from PHP.

~A!