This blog post guide you around installing multiple versions of PHP on Amazon Linux

1. Install Multiple Versions of PHP

1. Install PHP 5.6 and php56-fpm

$ sudo yum install php56 php56-fpm

2. Install PHP 7.1 and php71-fpm

$ sudo yum install php71 php71-fpm

2. Install Apache fcgi modules

1. Update your httpd first:

$ sudo yum update httpd

2. Install fcgi modules

   1. The easy way:

   We just run this command

   $ sudo yum install mod_fcgid

   If your server can install the module as normal, then proceed to step 3. If not, you have to install mod_fcgi the hard way(from source).

   2. The hard way: 2.1 Download the latest tar ball from source

      $ cd /usr/local/src && wget http://ftp.jaist.ac.jp/pub/apache//httpd/mod_fcgid/mod_fcgid-2.3.9.tar.gz

      2.2 Unzip

      $ tar -xzvf mod_fcgid-2.3.9.tar.gz

      2.3 Build it

      $ cd mod_fcgid-2.3.9
      $ ./configure.apxs

      If you get some error like me, congratulation, we have to fix somethings.

      ./configure.apxs must be able to find apxs in your path, or the environment variable APXS must provide the full path of APXS,
      or you may specify it with: APXS=/path/to/apxs ./configure.apxs

      You can refer to this link to get the apsx [link]()

   3. Config the build

      $ ./configure.apxs
      $ make
      $ make install

      You can check the result by calling phpinfo.

3. Config PHP-FPM listening ports

We have installed php71-fpm and php56-fpm, so the next step is to configure these tools to listen on different ports. Firstly, we will make php71-fpm listens on some port like 9071 and php56-fpm listens on port 9056. We will edit the file /etc/php-fpm-5.6.d/www.conf and add the row below

listen = 127.0.0.1:9056

We have to rename the default php-fpm.conf file to another name (I don't know how to work around this problem yet.)

$ mv /etc/php-fpm.conf /etc/php-fpm.conf.backup

We then force these service to read from its own config file by uncomment these lines:

$ vim /etc/sysconfig/php-fpm-7.1

we uncomment this line #OPTIONS="-y /etc/php-fpm-7.3.conf"

The default listening ports is 9000 but it seems a little difficult to remember so I changed it to 9056 We do the same thing for php71-fpm and make it listens to port 9071. Then we will start both service by the comment below:

$ /etc/init.d/php-fpm-5.6 start
$ /etc/init.d/php-fpm-7.1 start

Mutliple php versions help us to check the consistency of our application. With the help of php-fpm we can test multiple versions on the same servers. My next post is showing how to use docker to complete this task and compare these two methods.