CentOS 5 or CentOS 6 Upgrade PHP to PHP 5.4 or PHP 5.5

This article describes how to upgrade to PHP 5.4 or PHP 5.5 on a CentOS 5 or CentOS 6 server.

1. First, detect if any PHP packages are installed:
   # yum list installed | grep phpIf packages are installed remove them, for example:
   # yum remove php.x86_64 php-cli.x86_64 php-common.x86_64 php-gd.x86_64 php-ldap.x86_64 php-mbstring.x86_64 php-mcrypt.x86_64 php-mysql.x86_64 php-pdo.x86_64
   
2. Add PHP 5.4 packages to yum using this command for CentOS 5.x
   # rpm -Uvh http://mirror.webtatic.com/yum/el5/latest.rpmOr, for CentOS 6.x:
   # rpm -Uvh http://mirror.webtatic.com/yum/el6/latest.rpm
   Now, you can check if the new PHP (5.4: php54w or 5.5: php55w) packages are available:
   # yum list available | grep phpOr, version specific search:
   # yum list available | grep php54
   
3. Next, install the new PHP 5.4 or 5.5 packages, for example when installing PHP 5.4 packages I used:
   # yum install php54w.x86_64 php54w-cli.x86_64 php54w-common.x86_64 php54w-gd.x86_64 php54w-ldap.x86_64 php54w-mbstring.x86_64 php54w-mcrypt.x86_64 php54w-mysql.x86_64 php54w-pdo.x86_64
   PHP should now be upgraded to the new version, you can verify with the command:
   # php -v
PHP 5.4.17 (cli) (built: Jul 23 2013 00:02:04)
Copyright (c) 1997-2013 The PHP Group
Zend Engine v2.4.0, Copyright (c) 1998-2013 Zend Technologies
   
4. Finally, restart the Web server: # service httpd restart