Allan MacGregor has a post today talking about a handy tool he uses in his development to have multiple versions of PHP running side-by-side: PHPFarm.

If you have been working with PHP for a while, chances are that you have come across with a project, extension or script that requires to be tested on multiple PHP versions, for simple CLI scripts this seems easy enough but what happens when you are working with complex applications, developing for frameworks or multiple versions of them? [...] This setup can quickly become cumbersome and it is not easily scalable. [...] Getting multiple PHP versions running side by side can be challenging and over the year devs have released multiple solutions like PHPEnv or the new , personally I use PHPFarm.

He walks you through the installation and configuration of the tool. He also shows you how to get a few different versions of PHP installed, including custom configuration files. He also includes a bit at the end of the post about getting it all to work with Apache (via mod_fastcgi and some custom configuration changes).

In his latest post Andreas Gohr shares a platform he's developed using docker to create a multi-PHP version instance that can run locally with just a few commands.

Yesterday I tried to fix a bug a user had reported in one of my DokuWiki plugins. Apparently it only occurred on PHP 5.2. Well, the last PHP 5.2 version was released in 2011 and no modern distribution has it anymore. So how do I test this easily? After a few failed attempts with finding a virtual machine image that would give me the needed PHP version I decided to come up with my own solution. And because I was curious - I decided to build it on docker.

He's already done the hard work for you and created the "phpfarm" project that's easy to pull in and use. He includes the two commands to get it downloaded and up and working and running PHP versions 5.2 through 5.5 on ports 8052 to 8055. If you're interested in seeing his Dockerfile, check it out on Github.

Christian Weiske has a new post about a move the phpfarm tool has made over to SourceForge for its project page. phpfarm makes it simple to switch between multiple versions of PHP on the same server to make debugging and development a much simpler task (especially if you're not in a homogeneous environment).

phpfarm, the tool that lets you install multiple PHP versions beside each other, finally got a proper project page on SourceForge. By moving from svn.php.net to SF, phpfarm got a nice git repository, a wiki and a ticketing system. It also has a Phing build file now which generates and uploads release files, so people don't have to install git to get phpfarm.

His post also includes some of the changes made in the latest release (0.1.0) and how you can clone the code from the SF.net repository.

Christian Weiske has a new post to his blog today on how to get PHP extensions installed for phpfarm, the tool that lets you switch between multiple PHP versions on the same machine.

When using several PHP installations with phpfarm, installing PHP extensions is not always easy - mostly because Pyrus is very strict about package files - and many of the packages in PECL unfortunately have invalid non-validating package.xmls.

The installation follows most of the normal process with one exception - you use the phpfarm phpize and point the configure to use the phpfarm ini configuration file then enable it as usual.