How To Install PHP 5.5 on CentOS

In this tutorial, we will show you how to install PHP 5.5 on CentOS. For those of you who didn’t know, PHP (PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor) is a server-side scripting language designed for web development but also used as a general-purpose programming language. PHP code is interpreted by a web server with a PHP processor module, which generates the resulting web page: PHP commands can be embedded directly into an HTML source document rather than calling an external file to process data.

This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of PHP 5.5 on a CentOS system.

Prerequisites

• A server running one of the following operating systems: CentOS 5.
• It’s recommended that you use a fresh OS install to prevent any potential issues.
• SSH access to the server (or just open Terminal if you’re on a desktop).
• A non-root sudo user or access to the root user. We recommend acting as a non-root sudo user, however, as you can harm your system if you’re not careful when acting as the root.

Install PHP 5.5 on CentOS

Step 1. First, make sure that all your system packages are up-to-date.

sudo yum -y update

Step 2. Installing PHP 5.5 on CentOS.

To install, you must add the Webtatic yum repository information corresponding to your CentOS/RHEL version to yum:

For CentOS 6.x use:

#rpm -Uvh http://mirror.webtatic.com/yum/el6/latest.rpm

For CentOS 5.x use:

#rpm -Uvh http://mirror.webtatic.com/yum/el5/latest.rpm

Now you can install PHP 5.5:

#yum install php55w --enablerepo=webtatic-archive

Once successfully installed, now restart the Apache web server and check your PHP version using the following command below:

#service httpd restart
#php -v

PHP should now be installed. You can check by creating a file called info.php in /var/www/html/ with the following content:

<?php
 phpinfo();
 ?>

Congratulations! You have successfully installed PHP. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing PHP 5.5 in the CentOS system. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you check the official PHP website.