The information here is being used to overwrite the original PHP install on a DreamHost PS, mostly because I want to enable SOAP and XMLRPC.

Since the OS is currently Debian Etch I need to download, compile, and install xmlrpc-epi:

http://xmlrpc-epi.sourceforge.net/

I want to enable SOAP so I modified the configure command to use:

‘./configure’ ‘–prefix=/usr/local/php5′ ‘–datadir=/usr/local/php5/share’ ‘–localstatedir=/usr/local/php5/var’ ‘–enable-sockets’ ‘–enable-fastcgi’ ‘–enable-bcmath’ ‘–with-pear=/usr/local/php5/lib/pear’ ‘–with-mysql=/usr’ ‘–enable-calendar’ ‘–with-mhash=/usr’ ‘–with-kerberos’ ‘–enable-force-cgi-redirect’ ‘–with-config-file-path=/etc/php5/cgi’ ‘–with-imap’ ‘–with-imap-ssl’ ‘–with-gd’ ‘–with-xsl’ ‘–with-ttf=/usr’ ‘–with-freetype-dir=/usr’ ‘–enable-exif’ ‘–with-jpeg-dir=/usr’ ‘–with-png-dir=/usr’ ‘–with-zlib-dir=/usr’ ‘–with-pdo-mysql’ ‘–enable-ftp’ ‘–with-curl=/usr’ ‘–with-pspell=/usr’ ‘–enable-mbstring’ ‘–with-mcrypt’ ‘–with-mysqli’ ‘–with-openssl=/usr’ ‘–with-gettext’ ‘–enable-soap’

I also had wanted xmlrpc but ended up having so much trouble trying to get PHP to compile with it enabled that I went the route of downloading the debian etch package “php5-xmlrpc” from here:

http://packages.debian.org/etch/php5-xmlrpc

I extracted the contents using:

dpkg –extract package.deb folder/

Then pulled the xmlrpc.so file and put it into my extension dir and added the following line to the php.ini:

extension=xmlrpc.so

It should also be noted that the old configure command contained:

–enable-trans-sid
–with-xml
–with-xslt
–with-xslt-sablot=/usr
–with-dom-xslt=/usr

Which are PHP4 configure options and not needed for PHP5.

Finally, there are LOTS of dependencies that needed installation, can’t remember if these are all correct:

sudo apt-get install libcurl3-dev
sudo apt-get install libc-client-dev
sudo apt-get install libmcrypt-dev
sudo apt-get install libmhash-dev
sudo apt-get install libaspell-dev
sudo apt-get install libpspell-dev

That’s all for the time being, I’ll make a final post when I have all the details (and a working install) up and running.

It looks like it’s all up and running smoothly! There was one last catch, when running php through fastcgi you need to manually replace a file:

/dh/cgi-system/php5.cgi

With the file that was created here:

/usr/local/php5/bin/php-cgi

So a quick:

cp -a /usr/local/php5/bin/php-cgi /dh/cgi-system/php5.cgi

Did the trick.