My little project upgrading PHP from 5.3 to 5.4 or 5.5/5.6 on CentOS 6.5 with Virtualmin 4 was not so simple as I wanted. A normal CentOS 6.x installation with Virtualmin installed have PHP 5.3.3 on it. It’s pretty old, so I wanted to upgrade to a newer version.

But it’s seems like CentOS 6 and Virtualmin don’t want you to upgrade, because after the upgrade, no of my PHP pages was loading, or they loaded, but they was completely blank.

But thanks to Prometeus/iwStack and Mr. Salvatore I got it all fixed. So here is my guide that I’m using on any server I want to upgrade PHP on.

1. Use the Remi repository to upgrade PHP and MySQL

wget http://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/6/i386/epel-release-6-8.noarch.rpm
wget http://rpms.famillecollet.com/enterprise/remi-release-6.rpm
rpm -Uvh remi-release-6*.rpm epel-release-6*.rpm

yum –enablerepo=remi update -y

That will upgrade PHP from 5.3.3 to PHP 5.4.24 (15. January 2014).

If you want the newest PHP, version 5.5.x you must run the following command:

yum –enablerepo=remi,remi-php55 update -y

If you want to upgrade to PHP, version 5.6.x, you must run the following command:

yum –enablerepo=remi,remi-php56 update -y

Your sites will now only show blank PHP pages.

2. Edit php.conf and httpd.conf

Then you have to rename php.conf with the following command:

mv /etc/httpd/conf.d/php.conf  /etc/httpd/conf.d/php.conf.no

then you have to edit the file: /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf and find every line with php_ in it, and remove it. I have found out that there is at least one line per domain, so be sure to remove them all. I use Filemanager in Virtualmin, and edit the file, and the use the find and replace function, an replace all php_ with # .

3. Restart httpd

Then you have to restart httpd:

service httpd restart

If there is one or more remaining lines with php_ in httpd.conf you will get an error. Then edit httpd.conf once more and be sure to remove all lines with php_ and then run service httpd restart again. Repeat to it work.

4. Then fix MySQL

The last thing you have to do, to get everything working 100% again, is to run the following command:

mysql_upgrade -u root -p

Enter your root MySQL password, and thats it. If you get a error message, you are using the wrong root MySQL password. You can change it from Webmin, Servers, MySQL Database Server and Change Administration Password.