HOWTO: Downgrade ART 5.3 or 5.4 to Centos 6.x stock php5.3

[faris]

Here are some step by step instructions on how to downgrade from the Atomic (ART) php 5.3 or 5.4 to the stock Centos 6.x php 5.3. It is painless and there are no kludges.

SERIOUS WARNING: Use the following instructions at your own risk. You have been warned.
All I can say is that on a Cento 6.4 (64bit) install with Plesk 11.5.30 installed and Atomic MySQL 5.5, downgrading from either Atomic php5.3 and php5.4 to stock Centos 6 php5.3 appeared to work and all appears to be well afterwards.

1) add: exclude=php* to the first section in the /etc/yum.repos.d/atomic.repo
2) yum remove php-mcrypt (if you have it installed)
3) yum remove php-eaccelerator (if you have it installed)
4) yum downgrade php php-*
5) You are finished. Tada!

** If you see any errors at step 4 related to unresolvable package dependencies (for example php-zend-guard-loader), check that they exist in the Centos base repo. If they do not then just "yum remove" them and try again. Note that by removing these packages you are removing the appropriate feature/functionality from php and may need to restore it (e.g. via the EPEL repo for mcrypt) in some way. Thanks to lvalics for the heads-up about php-zend-guard-loader.

Some notes for those who are interested:
1) If you run "yum downgrade php" instead of "yum downgrade php php-*" you'll get some annoying dependency errors that yum can't resolve.
2) You HAVE to remove php-mcrypt because there's no such package in the stock Centos base repo. If you need this you can, apparently, use the EPEL repo to get it installed. I've not tested.
3) You HAVE to remove php-eaccelerator because this is Scott's special package that he created for those of us who wanted it, and no such package exists in the Centos base repo.

ALSO, please be aware that my testing was for an installation that only had the following php rpms installed (after mcrypt and eaccelerator removed):

php, php-cli, php-common, php-devel, php-gd, php-imap, php-ldap, php-mbstring, php-mysql, php-pdo, php-soap, php-xml, php-xmlrpc.


That's all folks! Elvis has left the building.

REMINDER OF MY SERIOUS WARNING: Use the instructions above at your own risk. You have been warned.

POLITE REQUEST: If you follow these instructions and it works fine for you, please do let us know by posting here so that others can be more confident that it will work for them as well.

ADDITIONAL NOTE: If you have upgraded to php 5.4 and are having compatibility problems or other issues with it and want to downgrade to php5.3, I strongly recommend you downgrade to the php5.3 in the Nucleus repo instead of stock Centos. Yes, you have to pay for access, but Scott's php5.3 is better than the stock Centos php 5.3, and you don't have to remove mcrypt/eaccelerator etc etc either. Scott has added his recommended procedure for this here, which is sort of the same but different to mine: http://www.atomicorp.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=7046

[lvalics]

I add to this as a small addon, yum remove php-zend-guard-loader(if you have it)

[scott]

Modded this thread up to sticky, great work!

[dsoundmn]

thanks for these tips - made reverting quick and simple. I ended up using an alternate repo - and I strongly suggest using the Nucleus Repo - https://www.atomicorp.com/products/nucleus.html

[vectorsites]

I tried to downgrade to 5.3.* from 5.4.18 and all it did was take me back to 5.4.17, When I tried it a second time it wants to install php5.1.* Any suggestions?

[scott]

Did you exclude the packages from the atomic channel?

[prupert]

I tried to downgrade to 5.3.* from 5.4.18 and all it did was take me back to 5.4.17, When I tried it a second time it wants to install php5.1.* Any suggestions?

This thread applies to machines with CentOS 6, if the yumdowngrade suggests PHP 5.1 you probably have CentOS 5. On CentOS 5 the PHP 5.3 packages are called php53* and you cannot use yumdowngrade because of that.