Help Develop PHP: 5.6 RC1 on Homestead

Last week we talked about Laravel Homestead, a prepared local development environment for PHP built on Vagrant by Taylor Otwell, meant to serve as a common starting point for all Laravel (and possibly other PHP) projects. If you’ve missed that post, I encourage you to give it a read and get familiar with Homestead as your next starting environment.

A week before that, we talked about the end of beta for 5.6, and the beginning of the RC program. The PHP core development team encourages people to play around and test with RC editions, and to submit build feedback back to them, so that they may gather some usage statistics and possible build errors to address in the next release. PHP 5.6 RC1 has been released some days ago, and can be downloaded.

In this post, we’ll have a quick look at how we can install it over the regular PHP in Laravel Homestead and report the build feedback back to the QA site.

Set up

To prepare, please read the original Homestead article and follow it to the letter until you have a working VM up and running.

Then, SSH into your VM by running vagrant ssh. Once inside, download the latest source via wget, like so:

wget http://downloads.php.net/tyrael/php-5.6.0RC1.tar.bz2 

Depending on when you read this, the link may be different due to other RCs already being out. Next, unpack the downloaded archive and change the directory to the newly created one.

tar xvfj php-5.6.0RC1.tar.bz2
cd php-5.6.0RC1 

Prerequisites

To build PHP from source in its most basic form, there’s one dependency we absolutely need. Run the following command:

sudo apt-get install libxml2 libxml2-dev 

You might have to run sudo apt-get update if you get an error regarding the IP address from which Aptitude attempts to fetch libxml2-dev. Then, re-run the above command (see gif below). Next, run:

./configure --enable-fpm 

We need to enable FPM because the Homestead PHP is built as FPM and Nginx consumes it as such. If we want to replace the Homestead-installed PHP with our own, we need to enable-fpm before compiling.

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