how to upgrade php on debian

after making and eating chili with jane, i came back to my place on the way to catch the tail end of a poker game, only to discover it had been postponed due to the wintry mix.

so it’s around 10pm and i settle down to work some more on the dynamic blogroll. i thought i’d make a few more changes (thanks to some suggestions from ryan) and release v0.3. of course some of the changes required that i have a later version of php, but my server is running debian gnu/linux which tends to lag in the up-to-datedness of its software packages.

thus began a long journey in which, with limited knowledge of debian, or linux for that matter, i attempt to figure out how to get php to the latest version.

now i have no problem configuring and compiling things from source, but my experience with debian has taught me that they put their files in slightly different locations (more like OpenBSD, i believe). so if i installed php from scratch, i’d have the debian version in one place and the newly compiled version in another and it would be a mess. but this was all moot because in order to install php to be used with apache, i needed apxs (APache eXtenSion tool) which i didn’t have because i didn’t compile apache from the source. so now i was going to have to install apache which would put its files all over the place and really gunk things up.

so i almost get to emailing my dad, i half composed an email to my linux hacker friend nolan, but i kept going back to google, digging around, reading php and apache install docs, when someone, somewhere mentions apt-get.org as a place to go for more up-to-date, unofficial debian packages. talk about the world’s most unassuming website. from there i find packages.dotdeb.org which is listed as having packages to easily turn your box into a LAMP server. perfect!

30 minutes later i figure out/remember how to update the list of possible package sources for apt-get (/etc/apt/sources.lst) update php and mysql, and i’m off to the races.

except it’s 1:30 in the morning. so really i’m off to bed. but at least i got php upgraded to version 4.3.10.