Wednesday, June 5, 2013

PHP 5.5 now available in BitNami


We are happy to announce a new version of BitNami PHP-based development stacks that includes PHP 5.5.0.RC1.  BitNami Stacks are self-contained environments that include everything you need to run your favorite web apps and development frameworks.

You can download a LAMP stack for Linux, a MAMP stack for OS X and a WAMP stack for Windows to develop PHP-based applications on your desktop, using your favorite operating system. There are also virtual machines available for download and cloud images to deploy them on Azure and Amazon EC2 directly.

These new development stacks ship the following main components:

- PHP 5.5.0.RC1
- Apache 2.4.4
- MySQL 5.5.30
- phpMyAdmin 4.0.1

One of the new modules in PHP 5.5 is Zend Optimizer+, an opcode cache module. It is a component that is designed to increase the performance of PHP without altering the behavior of applications by storing precompiled script bytecode in shared memory.

It is similar to the APC module that it is already included in all BitNami AMP/APP stacks. There are some benchmarks that report Optimizer+ is faster than APC.

To enable this module it is necessary to add the following in the php.ini configuration file:

zend_extension=no-debug-non-zts-20121212/opcache.so
[opcache]
; Determines if Zend OPCache is enabled                                                                                                                                              
opcache.enable=1

Once you enable it, you can check the opcode cache settings and memory usage in the browser using the opcache-status script that you can download from https://github.com/rlerdorf/opcache-status

opcache-status page for PHP 5.5


We have also upgraded our PostgreSQL-based PHP development environments: LAPP, MAPP and WAPP stacks are available as native installers, virtual machine images and cloud images.

Try now if your application is ready for PHP 5.5!