Developing a Drupal community site has been really good for a while until I needed to search a module to integrate Facebook Connect with it. I found this module specifically for that. Unfortunately, it requires PHP version 5.2, but the one on the Godaddy VPS (which is by default a CentOS flavor) is 5.1 I think. I needed to upgrade the PHP version to 5.2, and the best possible way is to install the latest rpm for CentOS and do a yum update. Here were the steps I did:

1. Login to your server using SSH then create an updated .repo file (you need to be root user to do this)

vi /etc/yum.repos.d/centos-test.repo

2. Paste the following lines in it:

[c5-testing]
name=CentOS-5 Testing
baseurl=http://dev.centos.org/centos/5/testing/$basearch/
enabled=1
gpgcheck=1
gpgkey=http://dev.centos.org/centos/RPM-GPG-KEY-CentOS-testing

3. Run a yum update:

yum update php

That’s it! Your PHP installation should be updated in about 5 seconds! :)

BUT! There are known issues on this, specifically for Zend Optimizer, mcrypt and mhash PHP modules because they are the for the older version of PHP. I fixed the Zend Optimizer issue by re-installing the package itself by yum:

wget -q -O - http://www.atomicorp.com/installers/atomic.sh | sh
yum install  php-zend-optimizer

For the mcrypt and mhash issues, I just installed updated rpm packaged for these:

wget -c ftp://ftp.muug.mb.ca/mirror/centos/5.4/extras/i386/RPMS/php-mcrypt-5.1.6-15.el5.centos.1.i386.rpm
rpm -ivh --nodeps php-mhash-5.2.5-7.i386.rpm
wget -c ftp://ftp.pbone.net/mirror/yum.trixbox.org/centos/5/RPMS/php-mhash-5.2.5-7.i386.rpm
rpm -ivh --nodeps php-mcrypt-5.1.6-15.el5.centos.1.i386.rpm

Let me know if this helps or what issues you came across.

References:

http://www.freshblurbs.com/install-php-5-2-centos-5-2-using-yum

http://www.atomicorp.com/wiki/index.php/PHP

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