Hi,

Apologies if this is in the wrong place - but I have a ubuntu 12.04 server running PHP 5.6 - However when I run a phpinfo() it shows as 5.3?

Any help would be great!

I'm a total linux noob.

Aidan

you'd need to give more information than this, do you know how PHP is being loaded, is it mod_php, fcgi, php-fpm, etc? The phpinfo page should indicate what it is. And how do you have PHP 5.6 installed?

Welcome.

One of your highest priorities should be to plan a migration and then migrate that server to Ubuntu 14.04 LTS or 16.04 LTS. The version you have, 12.04, will reach end of life in a few days: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Releases

After that, it will get no more support, not even security patches. So it will be rather important to see to the upgrade if you plan to keep the server around past the end of the month. On the way, the PHP version will be replaced with a newer version as part and parcel of the upgrade.

But also, you will now be confronted with PHP 7!

I'm not sure how to port PHP5 to Ubuntu 16.04 LTS. PHP is just all-around painful.

https://eev.ee/blog/2012/04/09/php-a...of-bad-design/

However, Ubuntu 14.04 LTS has PHP5 and still has a few years left on it.

Regardless, the upcoming EOL is something that can be planned for. There are two work weeks left, in practice, to figure something out.

personally, i'd say: if phpinfo says 5.3, that's what is running atm.
maybe you installed 5.6, but it's not running?
more info.

anyhow, i think the other posters already nailed what the real problem is here.

I know that 16.04 has neither PHP5 nor, so far as I can see, packages by which to install it.

The basic problem is that, with PHP-7, the authors rather-indiscriminately "deprecated" a whole bunch of things. It didn't seem to occur to them, for example, that production code might still be using the "old" regular-expression functions: out they go! (Until you write a very simple module to re-implement them.)

The original mysql interface functions are simply ... gone. There are two replacements and, as far as I can tell, one of them doesn't work. Neither one is plug-compatible with the old. (Until you write another not-quite-so-simple module to re-implement them, too.)

You'll be doing a lot of that kind of rework, and you'd better plan and budget for it. You'd better set up a virtual machine running this new version and see how your existing software base works blows-up with it.

Given the short amount of time left to make an initial migration and the general problems of PHP, even between point changes, I'd aim for testing 14.04 LTS first because it has one of the PHP5 variants still. That would buy a few years in which to migrate the web services to PHP7.

That appears to me to be a sensible solution. I just finished working (with a very small team) to convert a major set of websites from PHP5 to PHP7 – and to the web – and it took about one year to do it.

I wrote a number of 'helper' tools, including one that can estimate register_globals requirements (given that this facility is entirely gone now ...), and to do a number of other related things, which I plan to soon post to GitHub.

if you are going PHP 7 then you should go for PHP 7.1, as far as PHP 7.0 goes, its EOL is before PHP 5.6's as PHP 5.6 has an extended EOL (due to being the last 5 release). http://php.net/supported-versions.php

Naturally I will be glad to see the death of mysql_query() when mysqli:repare and pdo:repare are much superior options. But things like the death of the old mysql module for php are probably some of the areas where major redevelopment is needed in code...

Aidan:
To see if a machine is eligable manually, open a terminal and issue:

peek at the result, similar to this one in output format, but yours will have differing details:
You really have to get "current" on an LTS. I suggest LTS to LTS with regular updates to the server.