Mike Willbanks has a new post to his blog about a different sort of technique for deploying PHP - building your own RPMs instead of just using the pre-packaged ones. This opens up a whole world of customization options.

In the PHP world, one might ask why not just build it from source? Well, an RPM IS built from source and then distributed to many servers - we can ensure that we have the same packages on each, we can maintain the same versions and if you've read my previous post on Pirum you will know that I also like mirroring PEAR packages.

He walks you through the structure of an RPM package (the spec file, with examples, and the source), the "%prep", "%build" and "%install" containers as well as where the source needs to live for things to work correctly.

Chris Jones has posted a quick note to his blog today about some new PHP packages that are available from Oracle of 5.3.8 (RPM) with one of the latest OCI8 extensions already included.

I've built PHP 5.3.8 RPM packages with various common extensions (and the latest OCI8 1.4.6) for Linux x64. They are downloadable at oss.oracle.com/projects/php/. These binaries might be useful for quick testing. They are unsupported.

He points to packages on the ULN site if you're looking for something a bit more stable. The OCI 1.4.6 version of the extension includes a few new features but was mostly a test suite update.

Dan Field has a new post to his blog today about deploying PHP applications "The Red Hat Way" - as a single RPM package that can be dropped into any RedHat system and installed easily.

Red Hat is one of the largest Linux distributions in the enterprise market and there are a multitude of other RPM based distributions such as CentOS, Fedora, Mandriva, SuSE. Many people are deploying their web projects into RPM based environments and it makes a lot of sense to try to do things the "Red Hat Way". This post deals with introducing the Red Hat filesystem layout and automatically deploying a web application into it with the RPM package management tool and a YUM repository.

He shows how to build the configuration files, making a build properties file, creating the Apache configuration, setting up a config for the VirtualHost to be added to the Apache install and finally, building the tarball package and making it into an RPM.

On the PHP 10.0 blog today Stas points out some packages from Zend that are the source versions of the Zend Server platform:

I was asked about PHP going with Zend Server, specifically from which sources it is built - as we don't ship source packages for the builds. Since Zend Server includes PHP build that can have some patches applied from SVN past the release (i.e. if the package has version 5.2.10 it might have some patches that were in SVN 5.2 branch past 5.2.10 tag) - I think it is important that people know what they are going to run if the use Zend Server.

The two packages, php-5.2-source-zend-server and php-5.3-source-zend-server, can be installed just like any other rpm/deb package and will give you full access to the source of the latest Zend Server installation. There's no Changelog included yet, but it should be "Coming Soon" according to Stas.

Chris Jones has announced that the latest build of the OCI8 drivers for PHP (the RPM of them) has been posted to their "Unbreakable Linux Network" site.

A "php-oci8-11gR1" RPM is now available on the "Unbreakable Linux Network" (http://linux.oracle.com/) in the Oracle channel. If you have the appropriate ULN subscription, you can use 'up2date' or 'yum' to install it and its dependencies (e.g. the Oracle Instant Client 11g RPM).

This new package includes drivers for 9iR2, 10g and 11g Oracle databases and uses connection pooling if it is available.

Christopher Jones has a (very) quick announcement about the latest builds of the PHP RPMs for Enterprise linux installations:

PHP 5.2.5 RPMs for x86 Enterprise Linux (i.e. RHEL) 4.6 and 5.1 are on http://oss.oracle.com/projects/php/. These are supplied "as is".

The RPMs are part of a project to provide support for Oracle Enterprise Linux servers (as well as Red Hat installs) and provide a PHP command line, CGI interface and an Apache module quickly and easily. Check out the project page to find out more and to grab this latest build.

Maggie Nelson has linked to a blog post detailing one of the simplest ways to get a powerful database system, Oracle, up and working with PHP:

This is something that I wanted to post up for a while, because this is rather simple stuff and yet it took me a while to put this whole thing together for my own use/setup. It's also something that got some people interested and they asked me to post this up. So this post is for Maggie Nelson who is an active PHP and Oracle advocate.

It's basically an eleven step process to get things up and working (on linux) and involves installing RPMs, editing config files, and configuring the PHP installation to pull in the Oracle module.

The HowTo Forge website has a new tutorial CentOS users out there might want to check out. It steps through the installation of a MSSQL database extension for PHP (it's not installed by default) from the yum repository.

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.

Both Christopher Jones and Alison Holloway have pointed out some new PHP RPMs for Oracle with improved PDO_OCI and OCI8 functionality.

Good news everyone. We've just released a set of RPMs for PHP which include OCI8 and the Oracle PDO driver, as well as many other PHP extensions. These are for development testing only, as Oracle doesn't support them. The RPMs are based on PHP 5.2.3.

You can grab these latest RPMs from the oss.oracle.com website and to install them, follow the steps outlined on Alison's blog.