How to Install PHP 7 in CentOS 6

The CentOS 6 official software repositories has PHP 5.3 which has reached end of life and no longer actively maintained by the developers.
To keep up with the latest features and security updates, you need a newer (probably the latest) version of PHP on your CentOS 6 system.

For the purpose of this guide, we will be operating the system as root, if that is not the case for you, make use of the sudo command to acquire root privileges.

Installing PHP 7 on CentOS 7

1. To install latest PHP 7, you need to add EPEL and Remi repository to your CentOS 6 system like so.

# yum install https://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/epel-release-latest-6.noarch.rpm
# yum install http://rpms.remirepo.net/enterprise/remi-release-6.rpm

2. Now install yum-utils, a group of useful tools that enhance yum’s default package management features.
Yum-utils can be used for manipulating package repositories and additional package management operations such as enabling or disabling packages without any manual configuration by a system administrator.
You can install it as follows:

# yum install yum-utils

3. In this step, you need to enable Remi repository using yum-config-manager utility, as the default repository for installing PHP.

# yum-config-manager --enable remi-php70   [Install PHP 7.0]

If you want to install PHP 7.1 or PHP 7.2 on CentOS 6, just enable it as shown.

# yum-config-manager --enable remi-php71   [Install PHP 7.1]
# yum-config-manager --enable remi-php72   [Install PHP 7.2]

4. Then finally install PHP 7 on CentOS 6 with all necessary PHP modules using the following command.

# yum install php php-mcrypt php-cli php-gd php-curl php-mysql php-ldap php-zip php-fileinfo 

Install PHP 7 on CentOS 6

If you are curious, double check the installed version of PHP on your system as follows.

# php -V 

Check PHP Version in CentOS 6

You might also want to check out these useful PHP articles:

Continue reading How to Install PHP 7 in CentOS 6

Updated and tested (as of this post date) version of /etc/yum.repos.d/CentOS-Base.repo for Centos 5.11 (final):

# CentOS-Base.repo
#
# The mirror system uses the connecting IP address of the client and the
# update status of each mirror to pick mirrors that are updated to and
# geographically close to the client.  You should use this for CentOS updates
# unless you are manually picking other mirrors.
#
# If the mirrorlist= does not work for you, as a fall back you can try the 
# remarked out baseurl= line instead.
#
#

[base]
name=CentOS-$releasever - Base
#mirrorlist=http://mirrorlist.centos.org/?release=$releasever&arch=$basearch&repo=os
#baseurl=http://mirror.centos.org/centos/$releasever/os/$basearch/
baseurl=http://vault.centos.org/5.11/os/$basearch
gpgcheck=1
gpgkey=file:///etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-CentOS-5

#released updates 
[updates]
name=CentOS-$releasever - Updates
#mirrorlist=http://mirrorlist.centos.org/?release=$releasever&arch=$basearch&repo=updates
#baseurl=http://mirror.centos.org/centos/$releasever/updates/$basearch/
baseurl=http://vault.centos.org/5.11/updates/$basearch/
gpgcheck=1
gpgkey=file:///etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-CentOS-5

#additional packages that may be useful
[extras]
name=CentOS-$releasever - Extras
#mirrorlist=http://mirrorlist.centos.org/?release=$releasever&arch=$basearch&repo=extras
#baseurl=http://mirror.centos.org/centos/$releasever/extras/$basearch/
baseurl=http://vault.centos.org/5.11/extras/$basearch/
gpgcheck=1
gpgkey=file:///etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-CentOS-5

#additional packages that extend functionality of existing packages
[centosplus]
name=CentOS-$releasever - Plus
#mirrorlist=http://mirrorlist.centos.org/?release=$releasever&arch=$basearch&repo=centosplus
#baseurl=http://mirror.centos.org/centos/$releasever/centosplus/$basearch/
baseurl=http://vault.centos.org/5.11/centosplus/$basearch/
gpgcheck=1
enabled=0
gpgkey=file:///etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-CentOS-5

#contrib - packages by Centos Users
[contrib]
name=CentOS-$releasever - Contrib
#mirrorlist=http://mirrorlist.centos.org/?release=$releasever&arch=$basearch&repo=contrib
#baseurl=http://mirror.centos.org/centos/$releasever/contrib/$basearch/
baseurl=http://vault.centos.org/5.11/contrib/$basearch/
gpgcheck=1
enabled=0
gpgkey=file:///etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-CentOS-5

Continue reading Updated and tested (as of this post date) version of /etc/yum.repos.d/CentOS-Base.repo for Centos 5.11 (final):

Create a (local) repository and use yum to have it resolve the dependencies for you

Summarized and further minimized (not ideal, but quickest):

1. Create a directory for you local repository, e.g. /home/user/repo.
2. Move the RPMs into that directory.
3. Fix some ownership and filesystem permissions:
   

   # chown -R root.root /home/user/repo
   

4. Install the createrepo package if not installed yet, and run
   

   # createrepo /home/user/repo
   # chmod -R o-w+r /home/user/repo
   

5. Create a repository configuration file, e.g. /etc/yum.repos.d/myrepo.repo containing
   

   [local]
   name=My Awesome Repo
   baseurl=file:///home/user/repo
   enabled=1
   gpgcheck=0
   

6. Install your package using
   

   # yum install packagename
   

Continue reading Create a (local) repository and use yum to have it resolve the dependencies for you