Support for PHP 5.3?

[a8w4]

I know PHP 5.3 is not supported and probably never will, but what would be the easiest way to achieve this?

Sometimes I need to run ancient systems in order to analyse an migrate them - e. g. an ancient version of typo3 that will not run on systems with PHP > 5.3.

[rfay]

I've definitely wanted to figure out how to do that, but the packages we use (deb.sury.org) only go to 5.6, and it's not trivial to build older versions. I pursued that quite heavily when sury was going to discontinue 5.6, oerdnj/deb.sury.org#1092

But I think for now the easiest thing to do is to run a virtualbox instance with Ubuntu 12.04 and the basic standard packages that come with it. That's what I've done when forced to run an old site. Also... turn that old site into html!

[rfay]

If it's super important and you can figure out how to build the sury images from that comment, we'll figure out a way to get old stuff available for ddev.

[WarpedOne]

As a developer, it is often important to go back to old releases to check and see how an older version acted, or to upgrade or migrate. Many sites are running on dangerously outdated PHP and need to be upgraded. Are there possibly archived versions of containers? Possibly only as difficult as locating these copies. Running on a dev box isn't as big a security issue as running on a live site. I would hope developer tools would be able to assist in these cases. (Just my 2cents worth)

[rfay]

I would absolutely love to provide old PHP versions, but it's quite a lot of work, since deb.sury.org doesn't provide these any more. If I could figure out from #1714 (comment) how to build them, I'd even consider doing it, but that wasn't really very descriptive. We almost lost access to 5.6, and will likely in the future (although we have a workaround for that)

[rfay]

I did some poking around for non-Sury.org strategies for old php, and found

• a package-based approach (which has real potential). The mentioned PPA repository also has 5.2 and 5.4/5.5 and even 4.x.
• a build-from-source approach; I experimented with this but didn't finish the work.

[a8w4]

Thanks for exploring this further! I think I can point you to an alternative right in the middle of the two mentioned strategies: http://phpbrew.github.io/phpbrew/
No ready build packages but quite a lot of automation. I believe you especially will like the phpbrew switch command: This way PHPBrew would allow to build only one image for all the old an upcoming unsupported versions of PHP!

[rfay]

phpbrew looks like it might just be pretty nice. It would probably mean a horrible image build session while building docker image. But way lots of flexibility. And if we used it, it might be possible for people to just go wherever they wanted to go with the versioning. Occasionally people will ask for a minor version.

The downside is that everything is currently built around the very nice sury.org multiple-supported-php-packages approach, and we'd lose that.

[a8w4]

You're right: it's a lot of building beforehand - but how about a two-way approach: sury.org for the supported versions and phpbrew for the unsupported versions? The unsupported versions image could also be pre-built, can't it? All those unsupported versions per definition don't move much anymore.

[rfay]

I immediately ran into phpbrew/phpbrew#861, phpbrew completely failed; I actually ran into this same issue trying to build manually. I'm not sure phpbrew is as robust as it wants to be. Of course, it's always a mess trying to build old recipes on newer systems, and that's what's actually going on here.

I do agree that it might be possible to use sury for current versions and phpbrew for older. Or just provide a recipe for people to do their own. But it would have to work better :) If you use Debian or Ubuntu... are you able to use phpbrew to build 5.3 or 5.4?

[rfay]

Yeah, for all its promise, phpbrew is an animal whose complexity is just the complexity of building old PHP on new systems. The biggest problem is openssl, whose current versions are incompatible with the ones that php5.x need. phpbrew/phpbrew#939 gives a strategy for working around this with old libraries, but it's not actually compatible with using the machine for anything else.

[WarpedOne]

What I was hinting at was working with one of the other projects to find old images that might work. Might need older versions from several projects. Or working with them for suggestions. Maybe versions could be created just for DDEV use. I know Docker had a security issue a while back where some images were available that had malware. I believe they were 3rd party and recommended being careful whose images you used, but not sure if any others were compromised. Docker Toolbox uses https://github.com/boot2docker/boot2docker This contains the Linux kernel and base Linux. Possibly use older versions? It would be like using the older containers that remain after a DDEV upgrade, although Docker upgrades the containers to the latest when you upgrade Docker. Just throwing out some ideas, hoping to trigger other ideas.

[rfay]

I tried the libraries from https://github.com/zener05/debian-stretch-php-5-3 with lots of hopes. But too many of the modules wouldn't install, including gd but most importantly mysql, which depends on a library not included in stretch.

Experimented with adding this to the Dockerfile, which hopes of transplanting it later to a .ddev/web-build/Dockerfile recipe:

RUN apt-get update && apt-get install -y logrotate  #libicu55 libmysqlclient18 libreadline6
RUN wget -nv https://launchpad.net/~sergey-dryabzhinsky/+archive/ubuntu/php53/+files/php53-cli_5.3.29-1sergeyd14.4~xenial1_amd64.deb https://launchpad.net/~sergey-dryabzhinsky/+archive/ubuntu/php53/+files/php53-common_5.3.29-1sergeyd14.4~xenial1_all.deb https://launchpad.net/~sergey-dryabzhinsky/+archive/ubuntu/php53/+files/libapache2-mod-php53_5.3.29-1sergeyd14.4~xenial1_amd64.deb https://launchpad.net/~sergey-dryabzhinsky/+archive/ubuntu/php53/+files/php53-fpm_5.3.29-1sergeyd14.4~xenial1_amd64.deb && \
( wget -nv $(for item in bcmath bz2 curl gd intl json mysql pgsql mbstring sqlite3 readline xdebug xml xmlrpc zip; do printf "https://launchpad.net/~sergey-dryabzhinsky/+archive/ubuntu/php53/+files/php53-mod-${item}_5.3.29-1sergeyd14.4~xenial1_amd64.deb "; done)  || true ) && dpkg -i php*cli*.deb php*common*.deb php*fpm*.deb && dpkg -i php53-mod*.deb

[rfay]

For @a8w4 though: The way I've dealt with this in the past seems to still be the easiest way.

• Find the version of Ubuntu that matches the PHP version you need.
• Find a web recipe showing how to install it on that version of Ubuntu
• Spin it up in Virtualbox and set it up
• Spelunk in your website.

It's way easier than what I was just trying to do in this issue :)

[kaystrobach]

https://github.com/zener05/debian-stretch-php-5-3/blob/master/README.md

[rfay]

Yeah, that's what I tried above (package-based approach), #1714 (comment)