RHEL 8.10 and PHP 5.6

Rocky Linux Tech Help
1

Hello

will RHEL 8.10 still support PHP 5.6?
Has anyone already tested it?

Thanks

2

There is no php 5.6 available for Rocky Linux. It is way end of life. It is not recommended to try to use it. Any application that relies on it should be updated or changed to use a newer PHP, such as 8.0 or 8.2 (available on 8.10’s release).

1 Like
3

It’s a strange thing to ask for, it might help if you explain what you’re trying to do, and when you say “still support”, you imply it’s supported by RHEL 8.9?

4

Hi, thanks for the kind answers.

Yes, let me explain better. We currently have a centOS server which is going EOL soon. On this server we have a web application using PHP 5.6, which is running offline. It is not worth to update the php code to be compatible with PHP 8+, too much work.

So, for other reasons, we have to move to RL but someone told us that RL9 won’t be compatible with PHP 5.6 while RL8.x still can.

So the questions are:

  • are there any problems on using PHP 5.6 on RL8.x?
    and
  • are there any problems on using PHP 5.6 on RL9?

Thanks

5

Any one experienced with PHP will strongly recommend migrated to at least php 7.4.33 which does work on RL 9.

You will need to weigh the $$$ costs of self maintaining and TESTING an unsupported and bug-riddled version . This includes rebuilding locally in MOCK any PHP packages that would require rebuilding due to new o/s changes in 8.10 and 9.4.

PHP 5.6 is DEAD](PHP 5.6 is dead - Remi's RPM repository - Blog)

6

OK, but this offline webapp, if it’s not important then just switch it off. If it is important, then re-think whether it’s “too much work”. Have you even tested it with newer versions of PHP?

To run PHP 5.6 on Rocky 8.x, I think you’d need to create a custom build with old code, becasue there’s no package for it. You could try something like ‘scl’ software collections library, to keep it sandboxed, but that would be a massive amount of work compared with fixing the old webapp.

7

PHP 5.6 is already EOL since 2018 - 6 years ago. This has probably got more holes in it than the CentOS server that it is running on. If you are going to run an old web application that is full of holes, you may as well just leave it on the CentOS server that it is on now.

There is virtually no point changing the operating system underneath it, when the web app is using an EOL version of PHP. If the app is offline, eg: it’s not accessible from the internet, then in theory the risk is low anyway. If it’s accessble from the internet, then everything most definitely should be updated because of the security risk.

PHP 7.2 is the lowest version of PHP available by default on Rocky 8.

If you are going to change the operating system underneath it, you should be changing the app as well and updating it to a newer version of PHP or rewrite it in a newer framework.

8

If your application is not updated to suport php8/7, you can run it inside a containar, which runs with php5.6 . such as this Dockerfile

FROM centos:centos7

ENV container docker

RUN  yum -y --setopt=tsflags=nodocs install httpd php \
      <your applications> && \
    yum clean all

EXPOSE 80

...
9

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