Phil Sturgeon has written up a new tutorial for the SitePoint PHP blog showing you how to use PHPbrew and VirtPHP to be able to work with more than one PHP version on the same system.

We’ve all been in the situation where we have one version installed. Maybe that version is whatever came installed on our operating system. Maybe it is a version bundled into MAMP/WAMP/XAMPP. How do you go about switching that PHP version? How do you switch to one version, then switch back again? How do you go about switching that version of PHP, but only for one single application on your computer? The Ruby and Python communities have had tools for dealing with this for years. PHP has them now too, but there was nowhere near enough fanfare.

He starts with PHPbrew and walks you through a basic install and configuration of a version of PHP 5.6.0. He shows how to add extension support and switch between the different PHP versions at will. Next comes the look at VirtPHP, a similar system that takes a little bit different approach. It creates "environments" that contain the PHP version to a bit more isolated setup. With an environment created, VirtPHP lets you install PECL extensions without changing anything globally. He ends the post with a comparison to how most developers (developing locally) handle their setup and mentions Vagrant, but notes that it may be a bit much for the solo developer.

The Three Devs & a Maybe poscast has posted their latest episode, #25, featuring an interview with Jacques Woodcock and Ben Ramsey about the VirtPHP project (among other things).

This week we are very lucky to have Jacques Woodcock and Ben Ramsey from the virtPHP project on the podcast. Similar in nature to Python's 'virtualenv', virtPHP is a tool for creating and managing multiple isolated PHP environments on a single machine. Currently command-line support on *nix based-systems is complete, however, during the show we touch on the challenges in-regard to SAPI support. We then move on to discuss the interesting paths each took to get into development, followed up finally with the weekly quiz.

Other topics discussed include the discussions around the "demise of TDD", php[tek]/php[architect], the PHPNG patch, PHP The Right Way and many others. You can listen to this latest episode either through the in-page player or by downloading the mp3 directly.

The PHP Town Hall podcast has released their latest episode, Episode #23 - "VirtPHP - Managing Your Herd of ElePHPants" with special guests Jacques Woodcock and Jordan Kasper to talk about a tool they've created to help create isolated PHP environments, VirtPHP.

virtPHP is a tool for managing multiple environments on your development machine. It is similar to Python’s virtualenv or Ruby’s rbenv, but for PHP.

You can catch this episode in a few different ways: either just the audio through the in-page player or by downloading the mp3 or you can watch the video of the live Google Hangout recording.

Matthew Turland has a new post today to his site looking at the combination of three different technologies - TravisCI, Composer and VirtPHP - and an odd error he was getting from his build about a missing requirement "php".

In the first build, everything worked fine under 5.4 and 5.5, but upon getting to the composer install instruction to install project dependencies and PHPUnit, the job for 5.3 failed with some rather unintuitive output from Composer that implied it didn’t recognize the platform package requirement that I’d provided for the minimum PHP version. [...] Since the cause of my issue wasn’t immediately obvious from Composer’s output, my first thought was that I needed to begin my attempt at troubleshooting the issue by replicating it on my local machine.

This is where VirtPHP came in. This tool provides an environment where you can install and configure multiple PHP configurations and switch between them easily. It provides a "glue" between the phpenv and php-build projects to make management of the results simpler. He talks about how he configured and set up his environments...and figured out his Composer problem.