How to Install stable version of PHP 5.4, PHP 5.5 or PHP 5.6 on a CentOS 6

Install EPEL and Remi Repository

1. To install latest stable version of PHP, you need to add EPEL and Remi repository to your CentOS 6 distribution using the following commands as root user.

# wget http://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/6/i386/epel-release-6-8.noarch.rpm
# wget http://rpms.famillecollet.com/enterprise/remi-release-6.rpm
# rpm -Uvh epel-release-6-8.noarch.rpm remi-release-6.rpm

Install Yum-Utils to Manage Repository

2. Install yum-utils, a collection of utilities that integrate with yum to extend its native features in several ways, thus making it more powerful and easier to use.The package yum-utils used to enable or disable packages on the fly without any manual configuration.

# yum install yum-utils

Install PHP 5.4, PHP 5.5 or PHP 5.6 on CentOS 6

3. Once EPEL, Remi and yum-utils has been installed, you can now move ahead to install PHP 5.4, PHP 5.5 or PHP 5.6 with all required modules on CentOS 6 distribution by enabling remi repository using yum-config-manager command as shown.

# yum-config-manager --enable remi-php54    [Intall PHP 5.4]
# yum-config-manager --enable remi-php55    [Intall PHP 5.5]
# yum-config-manager --enable remi-php56    [Intall PHP 5.6]

4. Once you’ve enabled selected version of PHP, you can install PHP (in my case I have chosen PHP 5.6) with all needed modules as shown.

# yum-config-manager --enable remi-php56    [Intall PHP 5.6]
# yum install php php-mcrypt php-cli php-gd php-curl php-mysql php-ldap php-zip php-fileinfo 

If you want to downgrade PHP version for any reason, you will need to remove existing PHP version and then reinstall the new PHP with modules you want.