PHP versions [sphinx only]

The instructions in this section only apply to accounts on sphinx

During recent years PHP has evolved considerably, and scripts written to use PHP 3 will not necessarily run under PHP 5 and vice versa. If you need to use a different version of PHP, there are several ways to do this. Scripts with the extension .php3, .php4 or .php5 are run under appropriate version. Giving the scripts a version-specific extension is one way to select the version of PHP used.

For all newly-created shell accounts, scripts with the extension .php will be run as PHP 5; some older accounts defaulted to PHP 4. (To see what version of PHP your scrips default to, type php-binfmt -v.) You can change the default version of PHP by running the following

mkdir -p ~/.alternatives
ln -sf /software/bin/php5 ~/.alternatives/php
ln -sf /software/bin/php5 ~/.alternatives/php-binfmt

Change php5 to php3 or php4 in the above if you want an older version of PHP. Note that this will affect all sites hosted on your account.

If you want to change the version of PHP used by files with a .php extension for all or part of a website without affecting other sites hosted on your account, you can do this by creating a specific .alternatives directory for this one account:

mkdir -p ~/.alternatives
cp -r ~/.alternatives ~/.alternatives-for-my-site
ln -sf /software/bin/php5 ~/.alternatives-for-my-site/php
ln -sf /software/bin/php5 ~/.alternatives-for-my-site/php-binfmt

Then create a file called .htaccess in the directory containing the site or part of the site that you want to run with a different version of PHP. This should contain the following line:

SetEnv HTTP_ALTERNATIVES_DIR /home/username/.alternatives-for-my-site