New Development PHP Platform Stacks released with 5.6.0beta4

Development of PHP 5.6 keeps moving forward and this week a new beta version has been released. This version is just a bugfix release, and is intended to be the last release in the beta phase. You can find more information about the changes for PHP 5.6.0beta4 here.

We just released new versions of the PHP development installers, virtual machines and Amazon EC2 and Azure cloud images that ship the new PHP version.

Bitnami PHP development stacks ship Apache, MySQL, PHP in addition to other libraries and dependencies. You can click in the images to download the files.

In addition to that, we have also upgraded our PostgreSQL-based development environments: LAPP for Linux, MAPP for OS X and WAPP for Windows.

Try now if your application is ready for PHP 5.6! Check out Bitnami AMP/APP stacks and post your feedback in our community forums.

PHP 5.6alpha3 and MySQL 5.6 now available in Bitnami

PHP 5.6.0alpha3 was been released at the end of the last week and we are happy to announce that the Bitnami Library includes now support for this PHP version in our stacks: WAMP for Windows, MAMP for OS X and LAMP for Linux. There are also virtual machines available for download and cloud images to deploy them on Bitnami Cloud Hosting, Azure and Amazon EC2 directly.


The stacks allow you to setup instant PHP development and testing environments locally in your desktop or in the cloud. They include everything you need to start working on web applications and development frameworks. PHP 5.6 is still under testing, so there can be features that can be changed before the final 5.6.0 release.

WAMP stack installer

WAPP, MAPP and LAPP stacks are also available in case you prefer to use PostgreSQL database.

These new development stacks ship the following main components:
- PHP 5.6.0alpha3
- Apache 2.4.7
- MySQL 5.6.16 (PostgreSQL 9.3.2)
- phpMyAdmin 4.1.9

About PHP 5.6.0alpha3, the most important new features compared with the PHP 5.5 version are:

• phpdbg: PHP now includes an interactive debugger called phpdbg implemented as a SAPI module.

• Large file uploads: Files larger than 2 gigabytes in size are now accepted.

• gost-crypto hash algorithm: The gost-crypto hash algorithm has been added.

• SSL/TLS improvements: The OpenSSL extension has been extended to include support for extracting and verifying certificate fingerprints.

• Support for the Windows CA cert store for peer verification when no CA file is available

• OPCache module enabled by default

About MySQL 5.6, the most important features are:

• Performance: the optimizer has been improved, using Multi-Range Read and File Sort Optimization, as well as InnoDB (the default storage engine) to enhance performance of the MySQL database

• Scalability: as the database grows, tables can be partitioned to manage data more optimally, while keeping the convenience of a SQL interface for the full table. There are some new features that help with this.

• Replication: replication is a good feature for data integrity, availability and performance, and there are a lot of new improvements in this MySQL version which help to achieve this goal, such as replication checksums to ensure the integrity of the data being replicated to a slave.

PHP 5.6.0alpha3 info

Try it now if your application is ready to make the jump to light speed for PHP 5.6 and MySQL 5.6!

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!