I like the idea of using Vagrant to create virtual machines for my development work. Doing things this way I think keeps the host machine cleaner and allows you the ability to distribute those VM's to other people as well. My old boss Ben Ramsey did a very informative post on getting PHP 5.4 configured on CentOS so I decided to one-up him by taking his instructions and creating a Puppet manifest so you could do this using Vagrant or on any server that you can provision using Puppet.

He example is based off of the publiclly available Vagrant setup and provides the contents of the Vagrantfile that he uses to set up the machine. From there, Puppet takes over and uses his configuration (also included) to set up things like the Apache server, some configurations for it, a list of PHP extensions and, of course, PHP itself.

In case you haven't heard the news, the PHP project released version 5.4.0 last Thursday. Naturally, I decided it was time to install and give it a try. I chose to install to a clean and bare-bones CentOS 6.2 virtual machine using VirtualBox. I did this for two reasons: 1) I wanted a clean environment for the build, and 2) I wanted to play with CentOS. At the time of this writing, there are not yet any official CentOS RPMs for PHP 5.4, so I had to build PHP from source. What follows are the notes I took during the installation and build process. I hope you find them helpful.

His instructions cover the full process:

• Installing the CentOS operating system
• Creating a non-root user
• Setting up the network for local access
• Installing the packages for PHP (via yum)
• Grab PHP 5.4 and compile it
• Testing out the web server with a sample phpinfo file

He includes a lot of extensions in his installation, some you may not need like pspell, tidy, calendar, ftp or xsl.

Doing development on multiple projects can be a burden from time to time. One project would be running on PHP 5.3, while another still needs 5.1. Sometimes you need a MySQL server, while on other occasions, you need a NoSQL solution like couchDB or MongoDB together with all kind of gearman functionality. This article shows you how I've setup such a development platform that allows you to quickly create new projects, and still maintain flexibility when you need it.

He uses VirtualBox with either a Debian or CentOS installation as a base platform. He uses Vagrant to set up and configure the machines to make setup almost automatic. He still has to go in and configure a few things like the VirtualHost and DNS settings for the site/application he's working on. Next up is setting up the tools he uses, specifically XDebug and setting up his editor of choice (PHPStorm) for remote debugging.

CentOS 5 comes with php 5.1 version. There is no official PHP 5.2+ release for upgrade since last 3 years. [...] As a result, Developer had to implement alternative functions to integrate twitter, myspace OAuth API. Today wordpress has officially said bye bye to php 4 and mysql 4. So finally, I gathered some courage to mess with my current php installation. I followed the following steps to upgrade php 5.3 on centos 5.

The update requires adding the webtatic repository to your yum setup and using the "enablerepo" to pull directly from that. Once that's installed, you'll need to rebuild xcache to match the version (commands included).

I compile php all the time, I am constantly installing the latest versions on my own servers for various reasons. After doing this the first dozen or so times I started creating little batch files. [...] The other day someone asked something about my setup and I had to pull open the script to remember what I had going on and he asked for a copy and hence I figure others might be interested as well.

He's shared out the file here and it installs all the usual tools you might need including MySQL support with PHP being the only thing compiled from scratch.

CentOS in my opinion is the best way to go in terms of server distros. Some people, including myself, are frustrated at the fact that some software is slow to be updated out of a fresh install: specifically PHP. At the time of this writing, PHP 5.1.6 is the version shipped with CentOS 5.4. While I'm sure they have their reasons for this, I still am required to write somewhat modern apps - 5.1 just doesn't cut it anymore.

He suggests moving away from the compile from source option and "go with the flow" and work with the packages that've already been created. You have to get the testing repository set up first (creating a configuration file to add the name, baseurl and other keys) to be able to use the yum installer tool to grab the latest packages.

I thought that, seeing as this is a programmer community, the people who have not had the privilege to have access to the forums where these things were discussed or access to the code itself might be interested in knowing a bit about the underlying technology and code that powers this website

Some of the technologies they use include the Zend Framework running on a CentOS with PHP5.2. Some of the highlights in the coding process included updates to Zend_Auth, using Zend_Acl for access management, content management and other various packages (like Zend_Feed, Zend_Form, Zend_Db, etc).

Suhosin is a great and simple way of increasing your security without having a large impact on overall performance. In this tutorial I will cover the installation and configuration of Suhosin on both debian etch and centos 5. I may cover mod_security in a later tutorial.

They apt-get the packages needed for the patch in examples for two different distributions - Debian (etch) and CentOS. They also show how to set up some basic configuration to get the patch installed and working with your PHP installation.

As you might have noticed on Centos 5.0, there is no PHP-MSSQL module/extension available in the default yum repositories. So if you want to use it you can alter the PHP binary or you can compile an mssql module/extension. In this article I will explain how to compile the mssql module/extension.

It's a pretty simple process involving only a few downloads (RPM files) and altering the contents of some configuration files to make things work together happily. In the end, you'll have a dynamic extension you can load into your PHP installation whenever you want.

"MemCached" is a high-performance, distributed memory object caching system, generic in nature, but intended for use in speeding up dynamic web applications by alleviating database load. In this howto I explain how you can very easily install it and make it available in PHP.

The process only involves five or six main steps (installation, testing, etc not included) finishing with the loading of the memcache.so file into the php.ini for the system to enable it.