Installing PHP 5.3.x in Ubuntu through apt-get or aptitude

Recently, I wanted to play around with some stuff which is available only in PHP 5.3.x (more about it later in a separate blog post) and so was looking for a way to install it on my Ubuntu server, where this blog is running.

After poking around a bit, I found that Karmic Ubuntu hasn’t upgraded to PHP 5.3.x yet and the only way to do is to compile from PHP source. Even though I am pretty comfortable doing it, I didn’t wanted to do it, because it is very difficult to upgrade at a later point in time.

I was continuing my research and then found that it is in fact possible to install PHP 5.3.x though apt-get or aptitude. I thought of documenting it here, so that it would be useful for others who want to do the same thing.

Adding dotdeb to the source list

First you should add dotdeb repository to your apt-get source list. Add the following two lines to your /etc/apt-get/sources.list file

sudo vim /etc./apt-get/sources.list

Adding dotdeb keys to keyring

Dotdeb packages are GPGsigned. Issue the following commands to add the keys to key-ring

Install PHP5 packages

Then issue the following command to retrieve the updated package list. I am using aptitude here; you can use apt-get as well.

sudo aptitude update

sudo aptitude upgrade

And then you can install PHP5 packages (and modules) using the normal install command.

sudo aptitude install php5 libapache2-mod-php5

Installing php5-dev package

The above method will install all php5-* packages, but php5-dev has some dependency issues with libtool packages. In order to solve that you have to manually install libtool v1.5.26. To do that use the following commands.

Now it’s time to enjoy the new features that are available in PHP5.3 🙂

Related posts

Tags: ,

10 Comments so far

Follow up comments through RSS Feed | Post a comment

2 Tweetbacks so far

4 Trackbacks/Pingbacks so far

Leave a Reply to Sudar Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *