PHP 5.3 & MySQLi

No matter how long I try, I can't get a working PHP 5.3 with mysqli support.

I've read and tried tutorials everywhere, I've ranged through many errors, no errors, many different things, but the end result is always one of these:

1) It wont load period

2) It loads but mysqli doesn't load

Does anyone know exactly how to get these to work together?

I'm using a VPS with CentOS 5.4 i386.

There is no control panel, I've installed:

- Apache 2.2

- MySQL via YUM (all bits)

- PHP 5.3.1

Apache and PHP have no problem together.

MySQL works on it's own.

I've messed with lots in the php.ini file with no success.

As I read now PHP 5.3.* now comes with mysqli built it.

So I configure it...

./configure --with-mysql=mysqlnd --with-mysqli=mysqlnd --with-pdo-mysql=mysqlnd

Make it, install it, and PHPINFO() still tells me there is mysqli.

If tried a ton of different configuration lines, and all that compile have the same outcome.

I've been trying to get this server working for about 5 days now, and I'm really getting towards the end of my tether with this one...

Is there any reason you installing from source instead of using the package manager?

Is there any reason you installing from source instead of using the package manager?

I am new to Linux, and this is my first VPS, so I could be very off track here.

But if by package manager you mean YUM, yum only seems to support of to PHP 5.2.?

I specifically need 5.3.* and mysqli.

If you know a better way to install it, I'm honestly all ears.

Does config or make output any errors?  Also, make sure the native driver for MySQL is building correctly.

Also, you might have to set yum to use an alternate repo to do PHP 5.3.  As for which repo, no idea .  (CentOS tries to stay very stable and what not, so sometimes they lag behind quite a bit in new software.  As such, the yum repo from another distro might have PHP 5.3 in it.)

Edit:

If you look at http://php.net/downloads.php on the left PHP suggests http://iuscommunity.org/ as a possible repo for PHP 5.3.

So, you could try something like:

Make a file in /etc/yum.repo.d/ called ius.repo with:

[ius]

name=IUS Repo

baseurl=http://dl.iuscommunity.org/pub/ius/stable/Redhat/5/i386/

gpgcheck=1

Then run something like:

yum --enable-repo=ius install php53

(If you had another version of PHP installed from the main repo, you would probably have to remove it first.)