Best practice for multiple versions of PHP on one server

[petecooper]

Hello.
I'm trying to pin down the best practice architecture for a server with multiple versions of PHP on a single server. I don't use containers. I compile supported and legacy PHP-FPM from source alongside source-compiled Nginx as a web server. I will compile Unit from source. I understand that language module configuration takes place at compile time.

What's not currently clear to me is the best way forward to provide Unit support for each version of PHP. Does each instance of PHP need its own binary + module, or can multiple versions of the same language be baked-in at compile time?

Thank you.

[ac000]

If you have multiple versions of PHP installed then you can build a php-version.unit.so for each version you want, unit will load all these at runtime.

Basically you'd

$ ./configure php --module=php-version --config=/path/to/php-config --lib-path=/path/to/php_lib_dir
$ make && make install

for each version you wish to build support for, where php-version is like php-8.4 which would create a php-8.4.unit.so DSO.

Then in your unit config you'd reference these versions via the application.name.type setting where each type would be something like php 8.4, php 7.2 etc

The /status/modules endpoint can be used to see what language modules unit has loaded

E.g.

$ curl --unix-socket /opt/unit/control.unit.sock http://localhost/status/modules
{                                                                               
    "modules": {                                                                
        "python": [                                                             
            {                                                                   
                "version": "3.12.3",                                            
                "lib": "/opt/unit/modules/python.unit.so"                      
            },                                                                  
            {                                                                   
                "version": "3.12.1",                                            
                "lib": "/opt/unit/modules/python-3.12.1.unit.so"                
            }                                                                   
        ],                                                                      
                                                                                
        "wasm": {                                                               
            "version": "0.1",                                                   
            "lib": "/opt/unit/modules/wasm.unit.so"                             
        },                                                                      
                                                                                
        "wasm-wasi-component": {                                                
            "version": "0.1",                                                   
            "lib": "/opt/unit/modules/wasm_wasi_component.unit.so"              
        }                                                                       
    }                                                                                                                                              
}

[petecooper]

Wonderful - thank you @ac000, that makes sense. I appreciate your time & attention.