Installing and using multiple php versions on Debian 8.

multiphp.md

phpfarm is a useful set of scripts which makes the installation and usage of multiple PHP versions easy and convenient. Basically, the instructions below follow the installation guidelines from the official git repository: https://github.com/cweiske/phpfarm.

• Install necessary packages for build process.

sudo apt-get install build-essential libxml2 libxml2-dev libssl-dev 
libcurl4-openssl-dev pkg-config libcurl4-gnutls-dev libjpeg-dev 
libpng12-dev libmysqlclient-dev

• Clone phpfarm repository into local directory (another FHS-compliant install location would be /opt).

git clone git://git.code.sf.net/p/phpfarm/code phpfarm
cd phpfarm/src

• (Optional) Configure compile options.

sudo vim custom-options-5.3.29.sh

• Compile php and verify it.

sudo ./compile.sh 5.3.29
~/phpfarm/inst/bin/php-5.3.29 --version

• (Optional) Switching versions can be done with switch-phpfarm (see phpfarm repository for details).

$ switch-phpfarm
Switch the currently active PHP version of phpfarm
Available versions:
 5.3.29
 5.4.6
$ switch-phpfarm 5.4.6

Note: inst/current-bin must be part of $PATH for this.