PHP 5.4 Install on CentOS 5.x

So, PHP 5.4 is out now, and I figured it time I upgraded from the PHP that comes with CentOS 5.x (PHP 5.1.x!) to something modern. After all, 5.3+ gives you lots of benefits and years of bug killing and hole plugging. I pulled down the php 5.4 tarball from php.net and got to work compiling. Starting with what I had from a php -i, and fixing things in the configure line I ended up using:

./configure --build=x86_64-redhat-linux-gnu --host=x86_64-redhat-linux-gnu --target=x86_64-redhat-linux-gnu --program-prefix= --prefix=/usr --exec-prefix=/usr --bindir=/usr/bin --sbindir=/usr/sbin --sysconfdir=/etc --datadir=/usr/share --includedir=/usr/include --libdir=/usr/lib64 --libexecdir=/usr/libexec --localstatedir=/var --sharedstatedir=/usr/com --mandir=/usr/share/man --infodir=/usr/share/info --cache-file=../config.cache --with-libdir=lib64 --with-config-file-path=/etc --with-config-file-scan-dir=/etc/php.d --disable-debug --with-pic --disable-rpath --without-pear --with-bz2 --with-curl --with-freetype-dir=/usr --with-png-dir=/usr --enable-gd-native-ttf --without-gdbm --with-gettext --with-gmp --with-iconv --with-jpeg-dir=/usr --with-openssl --with-pspell --with-pcre-regex=/usr --with-zlib --with-layout=GNU --enable-exif --enable-ftp --enable-sockets --enable-sysvsem --enable-sysvshm --enable-sysvmsg --enable-trans-sid --enable-wddx --enable-shmop --enable-calendar --with-libxml-dir=/usr --enable-pcntl --with-imap=shared --with-imap-ssl --enable-mbstring=shared --enable-mbregex --with-ncurses=shared --with-gd=shared --enable-bcmath=shared --enable-dba=shared --with-xmlrpc=shared --with-mysql=/usr --with-mysqli=/usr/bin/mysql_config --enable-dom=shared --with-snmp=shared,/usr --enable-soap=shared --with-xsl=shared,/usr --enable-xmlreader=shared --enable-xmlwriter=shared --with-pdo-mysql=/usr/bin/mysql_config --with-kerberos --with-sapi --with-apxs2

This got me everything I needed, except that I realized that I then lost memcache. I did a bit of searching and I couldn't yet find a memcache extension for 5.4 (this will probably be fixed in the future). I finally found this site http://www.sohailriaz.com/how-to-install-memcached-with-memcache-php-extension-on-centos-5x/ which went into detail on how to install memcached from scratch which I didn't need to do... but it had one section that I'd like to echo here. How to use pecl and phpize to get yourself a shiny new memcache.so file for 5.4. Basically run:

wget http://pecl.php.net/get/memcache-2.2.5.tgz

then untar it and go into the directory. Simply running:

phpize
./configure
make && make install

Will create a configure script, configure the extension, make it (make sure you have gcc, but I assume if you compiled php that you do), and copy it all to where it needs to go! You may have to change where you're memcache.ini file points to for the extension or something similar, but this should get you back in business!