Today I updated my version of PHP to version 5.3.6 since I needed to update my PCRE. Did I have to? No. But while I had my hood open I figured why not knock them both out together. One of the main reasons is this very friendly error message:

The server wasn’t lying. When I did a PCRE check…

Alas, I did not have UTF8 support. Son of a … I downloaded the latest pcre source. When compiling I made sure to enable UTF8:

Ok cool. Now I have the latest PCRE installed WITH UTF8 support. Now I can recompile PHP. Wait a second… where the hell is my PHP source? Oh that’s right, I am on a server with everything pre-installed. Son of a … I’ve installed PHP hundreds of times over the years, so one more shouldn’t be an issue. Thankfully, the only prerequisite was PSPELL. Once PSPELL was installed, I could compile PHP with everything I need, or didn’t.

I backed up my modules/libphp5.so before running make install as a just in case. Guess what!? I needed it because for some reason I had compiled PHP with ‘–without-mysql’. *smacks self*

So I revert to my older libphp5.so and restart apache. Yay, I get to run my PHP compile again. I know, I know… make clean.

Finally, my PHP is updated along with PCRE and PSPELL. Now to check ALL of my hosted sites to make sure everything works. Uh oh… a few of my WordPress sites aren’t working. To the error_logs, Batman!

Serioulsy? Come on people… No one wants a little single quote floating around on a line by itself. After cleaning up the calendar.php file, all of my sites are up and running.

All of this just to install CodeIgniter…