So you got your fresh Debian 7 installed and realized in terror that it ships with PHP 5.4!
Most of the popular CMS out there are not ready for the changes in php core yet so you actually need to downgrade php 5.4 to php 5.3.
Here is how :
Most of the commands are self explanatory so you could just just copy & paste them into cli.
Edit the /etc/apt/sources.list file
vi /etc/apt/sources.list
and add the old Debian 6 repositories
deb http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/ squeeze main contrib non-free
deb-src http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/ squeeze main contrib non-free
save the file
Create the /etc/apt/preferences.d/preferences file that will allow us to “pin” the older php packages to whatever we like.
vi /etc/apt/preferences.d/preferences
and insert the packages you need to have downgraded to previous version
usually the following are enough but modify further if needed
Package: php5* Pin: release a=oldstable Pin-Priority: 700 Package: libapache2-mod-php5 Pin: release a=oldstable Pin-Priority: 700 Package: libapache2-mod-php5 Pin: release a=oldstable Pin-Priority: 700 Package: php-pear Pin: release a=oldstable Pin-Priority: 700 Package: * Pin: release a=stable Pin-Priority: 600
Now remove the pre-installed php 5.4 and all its dependencies with the following command
aptitude remove `dpkg -l | grep php| awk '{print $2}' |tr "\n" " "`
Update the apt-get so we it can find the older php version
apt-get update
Tell the system to install the version we want and previously pinned in the preferences file
apt-get -t oldstable install `dpkg -l | grep php5| awk '{print $2}' |tr "\n" " "`
Confirm success with the following
dpkg -l | grep php
Restart apache
/etc/init.d/apache2 restart
And there you have it! Brand old php 5.3 in Debian 7 :
Greeeat succeeeess!
