phpfarm

WARNING: as of 2021, PHPFarm is not actively maintained anymore. Existing users should transition to alternative solutions instead:

• Debian Linux provides co-installable packages (php7.4, php8.1, php8.2, etc.)
• Fedora Linux / Enterprise Linux users may refer to Remi Collet's repository (https://rpms.remirepo.net/wizard/)
• etc.

phpfarm is a set of scripts to install a dozen of PHP versions in parallel on a single system. It also installs the pear and pyrus installers and creates a local Pyrus installation for each PHP version as well.

This tool was primarily developed for PEAR's continuous integration machine.

The PHP source packages are fetched from http://museum.php.net/ (which is not always up-to-date), the official php.net download pages and the pre-release channels.

The Pyrus PHAR archive is fetched from http://pear2.php.net/pyrus.phar (which always refers the latest version).

If a file cannot be found, try to fetch it manually and put it into src/bzips/.

Setup

• Check out phpfarm from git: git clone https://github.com/fpoirotte/phpfarm.git phpfarm
• cd phpfarm/src/
• ./main.sh 5.3.0
• PHP gets installed into phpfarm/inst/php-$version/bin/php and a symbolic link to it is created in phpfarm/inst/bin/php-$version.

You should consider adding inst/bin, inst/current/bin and inst/current/sbin to your $PATH, i.e. append PATH="$HOME/phpfarm/inst/bin:$HOME/phpfarm/inst/current/bin:$HOME/phpfarm/inst/current/sbin:$PATH" to your .bashrc or similar file.

Configure options customization

Default configuration options are in src/options.sh. You may create version-specific custom option files:

• src/custom/options.sh
• src/custom/options-<major>.sh
• src/custom/options-<major>.<minor>.sh
• src/custom/options-<major>.<minor>.<patch>.sh
• src/custom/options-<major>.<minor>.<patch>-<flags>.sh

Where:

• <major> is the version's major number (eg. "5" for PHP 5.3.1).
• <minor> is the version's minor number (eg. "3" for PHP 5.3.1).
• <patch> is the version's patch number (eg. "1" for PHP 5.3.1).
• <flag> matches the specific compilation/installation flags (if any) for that PHP version. See Special flags in version strings for information on supported flags. The flags should appear in the exact same order as listed in that chapter for this to work.

The shell script needs to define a variable named $configoptions with all ./configure options. Do not try to change prefix and exec-prefix.

Switching default php versions

We recommend that you add the inst/bin directory to your $PATH to make the switch-phpfarm command always available. See Setup for more information on how to configure your $PATH.

Using the switch-phpfarm command, you can make one of the installed PHP versions the default one that gets run when just typing php:

$ switch-phpfarm
Switch the currently active PHP version of phpfarm
Available versions:
* 5.2.17
  5.3.16
  5.4.6

$ switch-phpfarm 5.4.6
Setting active PHP version to 5.4.6
PHP 5.4.6 (cli) (built: Sep 13 2012 11:24:56)

$ switch-phpfarm
Switch the currently active PHP version of phpfarm
Available versions:
  5.2.17
  5.3.16
* 5.4.6

We also provide a completion script compatible with both Bash & ZSH to make switch-phpfarm auto-complete its arguments. To use it, first make sure that inst/bin is in your $PATH (see Setup for more information on how to configure your $PATH.)

Then, for Bash: simply copy src/phpfarm.autocomplete to /etc/bash_completion.d/phpfarm as root.

For ZSH:

• Copy src/phpfarm.autocomplete to /usr/local/share/zsh/site-functions/_phpfarm (or another directory in your configuration's fpath) as root
• Add this line to ~/.zshrc right after the call to compinit: compdef _phpfarm switch-phpfarm

php.ini customization

The final php.ini configuration file is made from several pieces:

• First, the default development configuration (found in php.ini-development for PHP 5.3.0 or later, and php.ini-recommended in prior versions) gets copied to the location of the final configuration file.

• Then, the contents of the files listed below is appended at the end of that file to obtain the final configuration file:

  • src/custom/php.ini (initialized from a copy of src/default-custom-php.ini if it does not already exist)
  • src/custom/php-<major>.ini
  • src/custom/php-<major>.<minor>.ini
  • src/custom/php-<major>.<minor>.<patch>.ini
  • src/custom/php-<major>.<minor>.<patch>-<flags>.ini

  Where:

  • <major> is the version's major number (eg. "5" for PHP 5.3.1).
  • <minor> is the version's minor number (eg. "3" for PHP 5.3.1).
  • <patch> is the version's patch number (eg. "1" for PHP 5.3.1).
  • <flag> matches the specific compilation/installation flags (if any) for that PHP version. See Special flags in version strings for information on supported flags. The flags should appear in the exact same order as listed in that chapter for this to work.

Please note that a few substitutions are done in those files in order to generate the final php.ini configuration file. Namely, the following variables are substitued:

• $ext_dir gets replaced by the path to the extension directory This is mostly used to set the extension_dir option to the right value. This is also useful when installing a zend_extension like Xdebug as the contents of extension_dir is not used to locate those extensions.
• $install_dir gets replaced by the path to the installation directory of that specific PHP version (eg. /home/me/phpfarm/inst/php-5.3.1).

Post-install customization

You may also create version-specific scripts that will be run after the PHP binary has been successfully compiled, installed and configured:

• src/custom/post-install.sh
• src/custom/post-install-<major>.sh
• src/custom/post-install-<major>.<minor>.sh
• src/custom/post-install-<major>.<minor>.<patch>.sh
• src/custom/post-install-<major>.<minor>.<patch>-<flags>.sh

Where:

• <major> is the version's major number (eg. "5" for PHP 5.3.1).
• <minor> is the version's minor number (eg. "3" for PHP 5.3.1).
• <patch> is the version's patch number (eg. "1" for PHP 5.3.1).
• <flag> matches the specific compilation/installation flags (if any) for that PHP version. See Special flags in version strings for information on supported flags. The flags should appear in the exact same order as listed in that chapter for this to work.

These scripts can be used for example to discover PEAR channels and pre-install some extensions/packages needed by your project.

Each script is called with three arguments:

• The PHP version that was just installed (eg. 5.3.1-zts-debug).
• The full path to the folder where that version was install (eg. /home/clicky/phpfarm/inst/php-5.3.1-zts-debug/).
• The full path to the shared folder containing the links to the main executables for each version (eg. /home/clicky/phpfarm/inst/bin/).

Please note that a "shebang line" (#!...) is not required at the beginning of those scripts. Bash will always be used to execute them.

Given all the previous bits of information, the following shell script may be used to discover a PEAR channel and install a PEAR extension:

# "$3/pear-$1" could also be used in place of "$2/bin/pear"
# (both refer to the pear installer for this specific version of PHP).
"$2/bin/pear" channel-discover pear.phpunit.de
"$2/bin/pear" install pear.phpunit.de/PHPUnit

# The exit status must be 0 when the scripts terminates without any error.
# Any other value will be treated as an error.
exit 0

Special flags in version strings

phpfarm recognizes a few special flags in the version string. These flags must be appended to the version string and separated from it and from one another by dashes (-).

The following flags are currently accepted:

• 32bits to force the creation of a 32 bits version of PHP on a 64 bits machine.

  Note

  If specified, this flag appears in the final name of the PHP binary (eg. php-5.4.13-32bits).

• debug to compile a version with debugging symbols.

  Note

  If specified, this flag appears in the final name of the PHP binary (eg. php-5.4.13-debug). On the other hand, if this flag is not specified, the debugging symbols and other unnecessary data will be stripped from the binaries produced (resulting in slightly smaller binaries being installed).

• gcov to enable GCOV code coverage information (requires LTP).

  Note

  If specified, this flag appears in the final name of the PHP binary (eg. php-5.4.13-gcov).

• pear to install the pear/pecl utilities (useful if you plan to install packages from the PHP Extension and Application Repository or extensions from the PHP Extension Community Library).

  Note

  For this to work, you also need to drop a copy of the install-pear-nozlib.phar archive in the bzips/ folder. If specified, this flag will not appear in the final name of the PHP binary.

• zts to enable the Zend Thread Safety mechanisms.

  Note

  If specified, this flag appears in the final name of the PHP binary (eg. php-5.4.13-zts).

For example, to build a thread-safe version of PHP 5.3.1 with debugging symbols, use:

./main.sh  5.3.1-zts-debug

Bonus features

You may actually compile and install several versions of PHP in turn by passing the name of each version to main.sh:

./main.sh  5.3.1  5.4.0beta1

You may also create a file called custom/default-versions.txt which contains the names of the versions (one per line) you want installed by default. Empty lines are ignored in this file. Lines starting with a hash (#) are treated as comments and also ignored. This file will be used by ./main.sh when it's called without any argument and is mostly useful when you often need to recompile the same versions of PHP (eg. as part of a Continuous Integration process). It generally looks somewhat like this:

# Generic version used for dev.
5.3.1

# Beta version used to test for regressions
# and to report bugs to the PHP folks.
5.4.0beta1

Last but not least, you may pass options to the make program by setting the MAKE_OPTIONS environment variable (eg. MAKE_OPTIONS="-j3").

Caveats

The following entries are known issues which may or may not be solved in the future:

• Do not use --enable-sigchld in your custom options if you plan to install extensions using pear/pecl. When enabled, this option will result in a failure during the phpize step (this issue lies in PHP itself and is not specific to phpfarm).

• The --with-pear=DIR configure option has been disabled on purpose and this behaviour cannot be changed using $configoptions. If you want to create a (local) PEAR installation, drop a copy of http://pear.php.net/install-pear-nozlib.phar in the bzips/ folder and then use the pear flag. The layout of the PEAR installation that is created matches the layout expected by the Pyrus package manager.

• While this specific version of phpfarm strives to maintain compatibility with the original one, a few incompatible changes were made. These changes and the rationale behind them are listed below:

  • Historically, this version of phpfarm created a symbolic link in the installation folder named main pointing to the "main PHP version" (the one you would usually add to your $PATH). The original phpfarm later added a similar concept with a link named current-bin pointing to the main version's bin/ directory.

    However, looking at the future, this link seems a little bit too restrictive as some binaries may also be installed in the sbin/ directory (eg. php-fpm).

    Therefore, this version of phpfarm now uses a symbolic link named current (to roughly match the decision of the original phpfarm) pointing to the main version's root directory.

  • The original phpfarm added a script named switch-phpfarm at some time to ease switching between different PHP versions.

    While this version has a similar script (derived from the original one), its output is formatted slightly differently: there is an additional space before the name of each installed version and an asterisk (*) appears before the name of the currently active version. See Switching default php versions for an example of such output.

About phpfarm

Written by Christian Weiske, [email protected] Additional changes by François Poirotte, [email protected]

Homepage: https://sourceforge.net/p/phpfarm

Licensed under the AGPL v3 or later.