[CentOS] CentOS, PHP & OwnCloud/Nextcloud: the version dilemma

Tue Sep 19 17:59:00 UTC 2017
rainer at ultra-secure.de <rainer at ultra-secure.de>

Am 2017-09-19 09:36, schrieb Nicolas Kovacs:
> Hi,
> 
> I'm currently experimenting with OwnCloud and Nextcloud on a sandbox
> CentOS 7 server. I've been using OwnCloud for the last two years for my
> own purposes on a Slackware server, and I'm quite happy with it.
> 
> In my humble opinion, every admin who wants to host OwnCloud or
> Nextcloud on a RHEL/CentOS server is confronted with a version dilemma.
> 
> 1. CentOS 7 sports PHP 5.4, which has been officially EOL for quite 
> some
> time, but Red Hat will provide security update backports until 2024.
> Which is fine.
> 
> 2. Currently supported versions of Nextcloud (namely the 11.x and 12.x
> branch) require a minimum of PHP 5.6. Which seems reasonable. But if I
> pull in PHP 5.6 from Webtatic, for example, I only get the "official"
> PHP support, which will end in 2018 for the 5.6 branch. And no security
> backports.
> 
> 3. The solution would be to go with Nextcloud 10, which only requires
> PHP 5.4, and which is also provided in package form by EPEL. 'yum info
> nextcloud' shows that the current EPEL version is 10.0.4... but a peek
> on the Nextcloud homepage shows me that this version is officially
> unsupported. Uh oh.
> 
> 4. Some of the stuff I'm hosting on my CentOS 7 server (like CMSMS) is
> not compatible with PHP 7.x versions.
> 
> So right now I don't see a solution for this. As far as I can see, the
> "least evil" solution would be to pull in PHP 5.6 from Webtatic and go
> for Nextcloud 11.x, and have an EOL for both around next summer.
> 
> I'd be curious if some of you are familiar with this sort of dilemma (I
> guess so) and how you manage it.


I'm not familiar with running PHP on CentOS at all.

IMO, the default PHP-RPMs are not designed to be used for anything as 
dynamic as Own or NextCloud (or just about any other PHP project that 
isn't already dead).

PHP has a completely different release-model than RHEL.

As such, the version of PHP that comes with RHEL will almost always be 
outdated.


RedHat knows this and it seems it's available via SCL (Software 
Collections).


There's this KB article about it:

https://access.redhat.com/solutions/2146821


The gist of this is:

"Resolution
PHP v7.0 is available , however PHP v7.1 is still not available. We are 
already tracking this in a Feature Request to include rh-php-71 under 
Bug 1435193.
PHP v7.0 was first made available for RHEL 6 & RHEL 7 via Red Hat 
Software Collections (RHSCL) v2.3 as the rh-php70 collection
RHEA-2016:2730 - Product Enhancement Advisory"


https://www.softwarecollections.org/en/scls/rhscl/rh-php70/


With PHP, I try to stay as close to upstream as possible.
If upstream EOLs a version, it's time to upgrade.

If you want something stable, don't run PHP.