phpfarm

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).

Last but not least, phpfarm can automatically apply the Suhosin patch for the version of PHP you are installing. It does so by looking at http://www.hardened-php.net/suhosin/download.html for compatible versions of the patch.

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

Disclamer

This fork is tweaked to work on recent Ubuntu versions ( > 11.10), because this is what we use in our development environements.

Requirements

• gcc
• libxml2-dev

Setup

• Check out phpfarm from git: git clone git://git.code.sf.net/p/phpfarm/code phpfarm
• Add phpfarm/src to your $PATH
• phpfarm 5.3.0
• PHP gets installed into phpfarm/inst/php-$version/
• phpfarm/inst/bin/php-$version is also executable You should add inst/bin, inst/current/bin and inst/current/sbin to your $PATH, i.e. PATH="$PATH:$HOME/phpfarm/inst/bin:$HOME/phpfarm/inst/current/bin:$HOME/phpfarm/inst/current/sbin" in your .bashrc

Configure options customization

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

• custom/options.sh
• custom/options-5.sh
• custom/options-5.3.sh
• custom/options-5.3.1.sh

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

Switching default php versions

Using the command switch-phpfarm, 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
-Available system version:
  5.5.3-1ubuntu2 (cli) (built: Oct 9 2013 14:49:12)
-Available phpfarm versions:
* 5.3.27
  5.4.22
$
$ switch-phpfarm 5.2.17
PHP version 5.2.17 is not installed
Setting active PHP version to system version
PHP 5.5.3-1ubuntu2 (cli) (built: Oct  9 2013 14:49:12)
Copyright (c) 1997-2013 The PHP Group
Zend Engine v2.5.0, Copyright (c) 1998-2013 Zend Technologies
with Zend OPcache v7.0.3-dev, Copyright (c) 1999-2013, by Zend Technologies
$
$ switch-phpfarm
Switch the currently active PHP version
-Available system version:
* 5.5.3-1ubuntu2 (cli) (built: Oct 9 2013 14:49:12)
-Available phpfarm versions:
  5.3.27
  5.4.22
  $ switch-phpfarm 5.4.22
Setting active PHP version to 5.4.22
PHP 5.4.22 (cli) (built: Nov 17 2013 22:26:17)
$
$ switch-phpfarm
Switch the currently active PHP version of phpfarm
-Available system version:
5.5.3-1ubuntu2 (cli) (built: Oct 9 2013 14:49:12)
-Available phpfarm versions:
  5.3.27
* 5.4.22
$
$ switch-phpfarm system
Setting active PHP version to system version
PHP 5.5.3-1ubuntu2 (cli) (built: Oct  9 2013 14:49:12)
Copyright (c) 1997-2013 The PHP Group
Zend Engine v2.5.0, Copyright (c) 1998-2013 Zend Technologies
with Zend OPcache v7.0.3-dev, Copyright (c) 1999-2013, by Zend Technologies

If no php is installed on the system, only versions installed with phpfarm are available:

$ switch-phpfarm
Switch the currently active PHP version
-Available phpfarm versions:
* 5.3.27
  5.4.22

You need to have alias php='~/phpfarm/inst/current/bin/php' in your .bash_aliases to make this work.

php.ini customization

php.ini values may also be customized:

• custom/php.ini
• custom/php-5.ini
• custom/php-5.3.ini
• custom/php-5.3.1.ini

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 extension_dir is not automatically prepended to the path for those extensions.

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:

• custom/post-install.sh
• custom/post-install-5.sh
• custom/post-install-5.3.sh
• custom/post-install-5.3.1.sh

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

Note

You do not need to specify a "shebang line" (#!...) at the beginning of the 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

Warning

Your post-install customization script should always exit with a zero status when they terminate normally. Any other value will be considered a failure and will make phpfarm exit immediately with an error.

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.

• suhosin to apply the Suhosin patch before compiling PHP. This patch provides several enhancements to build an hardened PHP binary.

  Note

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

• 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).

Warning

The suhosin flag only applies the Suhosin patch. It does not automatically install the Suhosin extension. If you want to benefit from the whole set of attack mitigation techniques provided by Suhosin, you must also install the Suhosin extension separately (and manually), using a post-install script

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

./main.sh  5.3.1-zts-debug

Note

The order in which the flags appear does not matter, phpfarm will reorganize them if needed. Hence, 5.3.1-zts-debug is effectively the same as 5.3.1-debug-zts.

Note

The order of the flags in the name of the final binary will always match the order in which they are listed above. Therefore, a PHP 5.4.13 binary with all the flags applied would be named php-5.4.13-32bits-debug-gcov-suhosin-zts. Future versions of phpfarm will continue to use that same logic whenever new flags are added.

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

# Custom version which installs specific extensions/packages
# required for production during the post-install step.
5.3.1-prod

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

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 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, cweiske@cweiske.de Additional changes by François Poirotte, clicky@erebot.net and Jean-François Rioux, jfrioux@mantor.org

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

Licensed under the `AGPL v3`__ or later.