Installing PHP 5.3.0 on Zend Server CE 4 on Mac OSX 10.5 Leopard

As you already know PHP 5.3.0 is out, with lots of interesting features like namespaces and closures and other cool stuff !

I wanted to give it a try but I also meant to keep my existing Zend Server CE 4 installation.

Because of that I had to compile the new PHP 5.3.0 on my Leopard based Mac…

Find out why an apparently easy task has taken me over 2 hours of debugging, below !

Compiling PHP 5.3.0 proved somewhat difficult as I ran into a number of problems like MySQL 32/64 bits architecture, not finding a libraries like libxml in the system, other 32/64 bits incompatibilities and so on.

My troubles started because I had a 64bit MySQL version installed on my Mac (it came with the system) ! PHP itself compiles as 32bits and if you try to compile it on 64bits you will run into other library incompatibilities (btw, can’t wait for Snow Leopard to come out… all will be 64bits !).

After figuring that out, the rest was preety easy to fix !

I will tell you the exact steps you need to make in order to install PHP 5.3.0 over your Zend Server CE 4 on the Mac OSX 10.5 Leopard operating system:

1. download PHP 5.3.0
2. download the latest MySQL Community Server from Mysql (I used 5.1.36)
3. open up a Terminal window and go into super user mode (sudo su and enter your login password)
4. move the downloaded mysql archive to /usr/local (mv /Users/[your_username]/mysql-5.1.36-osx10.5-x86.tar.gz /usr/local/)
5. run cd /usr/local
6. run tar xzf mysql-5.1.36-osx10.5-x86.tar.gz
7. move the downloaded php archive to /usr/local (mv /Users/[your_username]/php-5.3.0.tar.gz /usr/local/)
8. run tar xzf php-5.3.0.tar.gz
9. run cd php-5.3.0
   
10. run the following configure command:

UPDATE: Download the configure command for PHP 5.3.0 from here (because FCKEditor keeps replacing — with -)

11. run make
12. run make test
13. If you get an error about libmysqlclient.16.dylib not beeing of the correct architecture do the following two steps:
14. [optional] run  rm /usr/local/mysql/lib/libmysqlclient.16.dylib
15. [optional] run ln -s /usr/local/mysql-5.1.36-osx10.5-x86/lib/libmysqlclient.16.dylib /usr/local/mysql/lib/libmysqlclient.16.dylib
16. run make install
17. exit super user mode by running: exit
18. run apachectl restart
19. at this point you should have PHP 5.3.0 running

Hope this quick tutorial helps you, as I’ve spent around 2-3 hours figuring out all the crap MacOSX has thrown at me !

I ran into a different problem afterwards, namely Zend Framework 1.8, PHP 5.3.0 and Zend_Cache do not work together out of the box and spit out this error message: "set_magic_quotes_runtime() is deprecated"; see this fix here !

If you have any problems or you would like to share your experience with installing or using PHP 5.3.0, know that your comments are welcome !

Finding time: To blog or to tweet !?

Lately I’ve been having problems finding time to write on my blog… that and the fact that I’m tweeting all my ideas.

I think that it’s faster to get the information out there using Twitter. Let me explain:

• you have to write only 140chars (including the link to a useful resource)
• you can do it very fast using a desktop client like TweetDeck
• you don’t have to think of a catchy title
• you don’t have to find appropriate tags
• you don’t have to write meta tags, meta descriptions and excerpts

Probably there are more reasons for using Twitter, but there’s one thing you cannot do on it, and that’s write something credible and of authority. If you have an article or tutorial to write, you just cannot sum it up in 140 characters.

So I realized that I have to find time to write all my ideas and facts I’ve come across on the blog and afterwards comment about it on twitter !

I hope to find time to write some new articles as soon as possible, as right now I have at least 5-6 topics.

You can follow me on twitter at http://twitter.com/mihaibojin, and I’ll most certainly follow you back if you’re not a bot and you have at least some remote interest about coding and/or technology !

The new Canonical url rel-tag

I just read on SEOmoz that a new rel tag was announced to be supported by Search engines: "canonical".

From what I understand you will be able to tag different pages with the <link rel="canonical" href="original page url" /> tag.

This means that you’ll be able to cover a whole bunch of potential duplicate content within your site. A quick application for this would be the merging of pages that are typed case insensitive, for example:

• /Page
• /PagE
• /PAGE

could all be marked as canonical to "/page".

For more information please read the canonical tag article on SEOmoz.