PHP has now been widely used as a development platform for web-based applications. As PHP is in continued development process, we observe different enhancements in PHP itself. One of the major changes we have recently observed is the release of its new version PHP5. 
Now your application is developed in PHP4 and you want to upgrade it to PHP5, but you also want to test it on PHP5 first.
In this post I am going to explain you the method to run both PHP4 and PHP5 on a single Apache server, and you will not need another server which can be dedicated for testing the PHP5 code.
First Download both versions of PHP i.e PHP4 and PHP5 as follows
cd /usr/src/ wget http://www.php.net/get/php-4.4.9.tar.gz/from/jp.php.net/mirror wget http://www.php.net/get/php-5.3.1.tar.bz2/from/jp.php.net/mirror/
Then issue following command to install PHP4
cd php4.4.9
'./configure' '--enable-xslt' '--with-xslt-sablot=shared' '--prefix=/usr/local/php4' '--with-expat-dir=/usr/' '--with-apxs2=/usr/sbin/apxs' '--enable-sysvsem' '--enable-sysvshm' '--enable-sysvmsg' '--enable-shmop' '--with-curl' '--enable-exif' '--with-dom' '--with-openssl' '--with-zlib' '--with-gd=/usr/local/gd' '--with-clamav' '--enable-ftp' '--enable-sockets' '--enable-exif' '--with-pdflib=shared' '--with-mysql'
make && make install
After successfully installing of PHP4 now issue following command to install PHP5
cd php5.3.1
'./configure' '--enable-xslt' '--with-xslt-sablot=shared' '--prefix=/usr/local/php5' '--with-expat-dir=/usr/' '--with-apxs2=/usr/sbin/apxs' '--enable-sysvsem' '--enable-sysvshm' '--enable-sysvmsg' '--enable-shmop' '--with-curl' '--enable-exif' '--with-dom' '--with-openssl' '--with-zlib' '--with-gd=/usr/local/gd' '--with-clamav' '--enable-ftp' '--enable-sockets' '--enable-exif' '--with-pdflib=shared' '--with-mysql'
make && make install
Well after instillation of php4 and php5 we need to manage two httpd.conf files. In the default httpd.conf file we will activate php4 module and listing port of apache then in the second file we will active php5 module and listing port.
Lets first edit /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf file
/etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf
You need to add or modify these lines
LoadModule php4_module /usr/lib/httpd/modules/libphp4.so Listen 192.168.1.10:80
Please change the listening ip address according to your network. Now we need to copy httpd.conf file into new name like (httpd-php5.conf) where we will defined php5 module and the listening port.
Just copy httpd.conf into httpd-php5.conf
cd /etc/httpd/conf/ cp httpd.conf httpd-php5.conf
Edit httpd-php5.conf file and modified these lines.
LoadModule php5_module /usr/lib/httpd/modules/libphp5.so Listen 192.168.1.10:81
It is not possible to run multiple apache on same port that’s why we need bind php5 on port 81. But if you have multiple ip addresses on your system then you can run multiple instance of apache on port 80. In this case you only need to change ip address rather than port.
Now lets start the apache with two configurations.
/usr/sbin/httpd -f conf/httpd.conf /usr/sbin/httpd -f conf/httpd-php5.conf
I hope you will like this how-to.
So why do you wanna do that?
C’mon guys, it’s time to let go of PHP 4. It doesn’t matter, update your codes or don’t use anything that is PHP 4.
PHP5 Rocks! PHP6 on the way!
Radical solution, to run two apache instances. Of course it will be more useful to run 5.2 and 5.3 along.
There is a problem with the ‘–’ (double dash) in the cli commands as they are mangled in a unique long m-dash.
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