Till Klampaeckel has a new post about replacing the now-missing phar port on FreeBSD installations with a custom compile work-around.

I noticed that archivers/pecl-phar vanished from the ports tree on one of my FreeBSD servers. Problem? Reasons to remove the port were: the port is unmaintained, the port was based on the outdated phar extension from pec and that phar (in pecl) contains open security issues. The simple solution is to create a new port which of course will use the phar which is bundled in PHP's core.

He includes the simple five or six step process you'll need to follow to compile your own phar extension for your installation - grabbing the latest source, compiling (configure/make) and putting the resulting shared object (.so) in the right place for PHP to find it. All that's left then is to enable it in the php.ini. Phar is an archive creation tool that (normally) comes bundled with versions of PHP and can be used to both read and write to compressed packages.

The PHP-GTK Community site has pointed out a work-in-progress guide to compiling PHP-GTK2 from Bob Majdak:

This document does not care about what distribution you use, these instructions will work on all shapes of Linux, FreeBSD, or Solaris. It is up to you to translate any line into the required line for your distribution. I will however tell you right now, if you are on Ubuntu and never done this before, you are missing pretty much every package you need.

There is one platform that there's not instructions for, though - Windows. All of the other major platforms are presented. Tools needed to compile your own setup include Autotools, the usual make tools, GTK+, a recent version of PHP (5.2 or higher) and LibGlade.

The PHP-GTK Community site has pointed out a work-in-progress guide to compiling PHP-GTK2 from Bob Majdak:

This document does not care about what distribution you use, these instructions will work on all shapes of Linux, FreeBSD, or Solaris. It is up to you to translate any line into the required line for your distribution. I will however tell you right now, if you are on Ubuntu and never done this before, you are missing pretty much every package you need.

There is one platform that there's not instructions for, though - Windows. All of the other major platforms are presented. Tools needed to compile your own setup include Autotools, the usual make tools, GTK+, a recent version of PHP (5.2 or higher) and LibGlade.

From Iain Dooley on WorkingSoftware.com.au today, there's a new tutorial covering the installation of PHP4 and PHP5 onto a FreeBSD server.

So, briefly here is my little recipe for getting PHP4 and PHP5 to run concurrently on FreeBSD using Apache 2.2 and mod_proxy.

He points out one method that's been posted to get this all working, but notes that there are a few issues he found with it. That's the point of this post - to rectify and solve those problems to have you on your way to a happily working PHP4/PHP5 installation.

His guide is broken up into the key steps:

• Compiling with mod_proxy from FreeBSD ports
• Installing another Apache instance
• PHP Installation
• Configuring and running Apache
• and a bug, Bug 37770, he came across where the proxy would just stop working

From Iain Dooley on WorkingSoftware.com.au today, there's a new tutorial covering the installation of PHP4 and PHP5 onto a FreeBSD server.

So, briefly here is my little recipe for getting PHP4 and PHP5 to run concurrently on FreeBSD using Apache 2.2 and mod_proxy.

He points out one method that's been posted to get this all working, but notes that there are a few issues he found with it. That's the point of this post - to rectify and solve those problems to have you on your way to a happily working PHP4/PHP5 installation.

His guide is broken up into the key steps:

• Compiling with mod_proxy from FreeBSD ports
• Installing another Apache instance
• PHP Installation
• Configuring and running Apache
• and a bug, Bug 37770, he came across where the proxy would just stop working