Sam Oliver

Here is a way to get PHP5 up and running on your Debian Plesk
system.

There is probably a better way of doing this but I haven’t yet found a way that doesn’t cause apt to remove the plesk packages (as they depend on php4). This method leaves the PHP4 packages on the server - the packages in the dexter repository behave differently than others I have tried.

You will need to SSH to your server using an SSH client

Login and use command ’su’ to change to the root user.

Step 1
Edit your /etc/apt/sources.list file using your favorite editor. For
example:

#joe /etc/apt/sources.list

Then add:
deb http://people.debian.org/~dexter php5 sarge

To the end of the file

Step 2
Update your sources with the following command

#apt-get update

Step 3
Install PHP5 using apt-get (add or remove the packages you require)
#apt-get install php5 libapache2-mod-php5 php5-mysql php5-curl php5-gd php5-session php5-imap

Step 4
You will now have both PHP4 and PHP5 installed in to your apache
configuration.

Temporarily remove PHP4 from your apache configuration while you check everything is working

Remove the symlinks in mods-enabled. You can re-create them from
mods-available if you need to switch back to php4

rm /etc/apache2/mods-enabled/php4*

Step 5
Restart apache2
#/etc/init.d/apache2 restart

That’s it! Test your installation by calling phpinfo(); from within a
PHP script.