I run a web hosting business. Recently, Benj (who also runs a similar business) decided to upgrade his server to PHP5 and trash PHP4 altogether. I knew that it’s gonna cause him headaches so I stuck with my plan of running PHP4 and PHP5 side-by-side so existing websites will still run as they were while clients who wish to use the features of PHP5 can do so as well. In my setup, PHP4 runs as an Apache module while PHP5 runs under FastCGI. By default, .php is handled by PHP4 and .php5 by PHP5. So to make use of PHP5, all that needs to be done is use .php5 as the filename extension or if you want to override the defaults and use .php for PHP5 scripts, then you can just add the following line in .htaccess:
AddType application/x-httpd-php5 .php
It took me less than one hour to finish it and I never knew that it was this simple.
Next thing to do – Ruby on Rails.
Click here for instructions to setup PHP4 and PHP5 side-by-side.
