Centos Plesk 9.5.4 Upgrading PHP to Latest Version

By | 03/02/2012

Plesk 9.5.4 supports PHP version 5.2.17 and optionally you can add PHP 5.3 support.

PHP 5.3 can be enabled in Home > Help Support > Updates section. But this version isn’t latest one. So we need to upgrade PHP manually.

Default Centos repository does not allow php to latest so I use another repository (atomic/remi)

To enable atomic use command below.

wget -q -O - http://www.atomicorp.com/installers/atomic | sh

Now you can test upgrading PHP with yum but plesk wont let you do this.

You can read kb article of parallels to upgrade.

http://kb.parallels.com/en/111630

After upgrade you may have mysql problem. You can see error log below:

110802 9:42:40 [ERROR] Can't open the mysql.plugin table. Please run mysql_upgrade to create it.
110802 9:42:40 InnoDB: Initializing buffer pool, size = 2.0M
110802 9:42:40 InnoDB: Completed initialization of buffer pool
110802 9:42:40 InnoDB: Started; log sequence number 0 1023798
110802 9:42:40 [ERROR] /usr/libexec/mysqld: unknown option '--skip-bdb'
110802 9:42:40 [ERROR] Aborting

To fix this delete or comment skip-bdb line in /etc/my.cnf file. Then you can start mysql service.

And you have to run following otherwise yo get “ Error: Connection to the database server has failed:Table ‘mysql.servers’ doesn’t exist” error when creating database through plesk panel.

mysql_upgrade --user=admin --password=PLESK_PASS --verbose

After all this you can use latest version of php and plesk 9.5.4

Parallels does not support this upgrade and I will not take any responsibility for problems after upgrading PHP.