--On Saturday, February 13, 2021 9:59 PM -0500 H <agents at meddatainc.com> wrote: > But my question is also a more general one: short of ridding the system > of the old, default php 5 binary, how should I configure a user without a > shell such as apache to default to the newer php binary? As mentioned > previously, apache itself runs the new php just fine (except for the imap > issue above which could also be some other bug...). CentOS 7 runs apache from systemd. Apache finds programs using the path. So you need to customize the systemd unit file for Apache to run it from within a script that first prefixes the path with the location of your custom PHP binary. Software Collections provides a script for this. See the systemd documentation for how to customize a unit file. You probably just need a "drop-in" in /etc/systemd/system that replaces the ExecStart value in httpd.service. Another approach is to run php-fpm for your custom PHP (package rh-php72-php-fpm) and have Apache connect to this via the SetHandler directive. Use SetHandler instead of ProxyPass because the latter doesn't play well with FilesMatch. # send PHP requests to PHP 7.2 via php-fpm service <FilesMatch \.php$> SetHandler "proxy:fcgi://127.0.0.1:9000" </FilesMatch> This will sandbox PHP into its own process.