How to downgrade PHP version from 5.3 to 5.2 in Ubuntu 12.04?

Question

I have freshly installed Ubuntu 12.04 and I have installed PHP as well. By default, it is installed with version 5.3.10 but my PHP project doesn't support PHP v5.3.10.

I want to downgrade PHP version to 5.2. How can I do it?

Answer 1

You would have to uninstall PHP and then reinstall an older version. However if your working on a project that your going to sell, or give to clients, or whatever the case my suggestion would be take out any functionality thats actually breaking between 5.2x and 5.3x and replace it with its new counter parts, as most people will not want to revert to older versions of PHP for any needs, and generally speaking php versions only goin in one direction, if you block yourself into 5.2 and your making software in one shape or another for people, what are you going to do next year when all the servers come stock with PHP 6? Not to mention a lot of hosted solutions try to provide the latest and greatest on there new machines, and will not revert for a single client especially on a shared hosting environment.

Anyway yea, back to your question again in your terminal under Ubuntu, you can try the following. sudo apt-get purge php5 which will then prompt you for a password, then proceed with removing PHP assuming you have the PHP package standalone and not bundled in with some preconfigured LAMP stack, but then again it should still work generally speaking so long as the version is right.

As for reinstalling it, remove purge from the command and use install. However you will need to look up the means of getting an archived version installed of PHP as apt-get will get you the latest