September 1, 2013
Chris
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Comments Off on How to install/setup latest version of PHP 5.5 on Debian Wheezy 7.0/7.1/7.2 (and how to fix the GPG key error)

How to install/setup latest version of PHP 5.5 on Debian Wheezy 7.0/7.1/7.2 (and how to fix the GPG key error)

php

Please note: This works fine. But this package will also upgrade your apache to version 2.4 which has different config files than apache 2.2 and even deletes stuff, like /etc/apache2/sites-available/default when upgrading. This may result in a loss of your apache settings (vhost, mod_rewrite stuff etc.). Be aware of that ! This shit cost me a full weekend. :(
This affects only upgrades, not fresh installs for sure.

Update on that issue: This is a known bug, I’ll keep this post updated…
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=716880

There’s a nice method to install the very latest version of PHP 5.5 on Debian Wheezy 7.0 or 7.1 with some bash commands.

 

1. Add these package sources to your sources.list file: Enter the file via

sudo nano /etc/apt/sources.list

and add these lines at the end of the file (right click pastes):

deb http://packages.dotdeb.org wheezy-php55 all
deb-src http://packages.dotdeb.org wheezy-php55 all

Save and close (CTRL-X, “y”, ENTER).

2. Do an update:

sudo apt-get update

You’ll get an error message in the last line of the update progress now.

3. It’s not possible to install PHP now, as Debian just gave an error and said that these new sources are not verified and blah blah, the public key is not available… I find this process highly unintutive and I really don’t know why it’s so complicated to update PHP, but well, that’s how it is…

Method #1
The last line of this error message contains a key, like “E9C74FEEA2098A6E”. Copy that key (mark the string with the mouse usually copies it into the clipboard) and run these commands to verifiy the new package sources (and put YOUR key in here):

gpg --keyserver packages.dotdeb.org --recv-key  E9C74FEEA2098A6E
gpg -a --export E9C74FEEA2098A6E | sudo apt-key add -

Method #2 (thanks Petr for bringing this in!)

wget http://www.dotdeb.org/dotdeb.gpg
sudo apt-key add dotdeb.gpg

4. Do an update again:

sudo apt-get update

5. Install the latest version of PHP 5:

sudo apt-get install php5

6. Check the installed version of PHP 5 (phpinfo() will still show old PHP version until apache restart):

php -v

Finally, restart the apache:

sudo service apache2 restart

By the way, it’s not possible (as far as I know) to install PHP 5.5 on Debian 6 (without compiling source code manually).

By the way #2, I’ve also written a tutorial on “How to setup latest version of PHP 5.5 on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS“, which is different from this here.