I’ve been an opensuse user since 12.3. I’ve never paid much attention to my php version.
However, I have switched to tumbleweed and saw that it installs php7. I have quite a few projects that need php5.
How can I install php 5 next to php 7? I would like both installed so I can continue to support the projects that need php5 but also start converting them to php7. I don’t see any advice on this in the forums or google searches. Trying one click install, it wants to replace php7, when i try to install php5.
You’re missing nothing. php5 en php7 cannot coexist. But, doing some webwork myself, the only issues I’ve met re. wegapps/sites on my TW server ( with php7 ) were some old 1.x Joomla sites, that completely stop working ( only homepage displays partly ). And in those cases I’ve warned customers over and over again to upgrade their website to newer versions, but doing nothing seemed cheaper to them. Resuilt: a very time ( and money ) consuming upgrade path, or complete loss of their website. But, you can (ATM) still choose to use php5.
PHP7 is actually an interative update of PHP5, it’s not a radical re-build.
But, if you really do need to deploy a lesser version of PHP5, since as Knurpht says you can’t easily run different versions of PHP side by side (PHP is installed system-wide), you’ll have to resort to some kind of isolation technology, the following is a shortlist of options…
Virtualization - examples include Virtualbox, VMware, KVM, Xen. And there are others.
Container isolation - examples include Docker and LXC. And there are others.
If Virtualization and containers are new to you, head over to the Virtualization forum and search on topcs related to the type of virtualization or containers you want to know more about… There are plenty of posts from similar questions asked in the past.
A quick google search results in the following, which is supposed to be similar to virtualenv for Python and rbenv for Ruby, which enables side by side PHP on a machine but I have no experience with it