Web Platform Installer - PHP Upgrade Process

I currently have PHP 5.4.24 installed via the Microsoft Web Platform Installer in IIS 8 (Server 2012). What is the correct process for upgrading PHP to later versions (5.5.11 and 5.6.0 are available as of the time of this posting)?

PHP Versions Available
street9009Asked:
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Dan McFaddenSystems EngineerCommented:
You can have more than one version of PHP available on a web server.  So it depends on what your actual needs are.

1. Do you need to add a new site the requires a new PHP version?
2. Does there exist an old site on the server that needs to have a previous version available?

If you are just planning to replace PHP, you can add it your server installation with WPI.

Here is a link describing the process:

reference link:  http://blogs.iis.net/donraman/installing-php-on-windows
how to link:  http://blogs.iis.net/donraman/upgrading-to-php-5-3-an-easy-way

The versions referenced are prior versions but the process is similar.

Dan
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street9009Author Commented:
The upgrade post doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me. As you can see from my screenshot above, multiple versions of PHP are available. Shouldn't we be doing any uninstalling/reinstalling via WPI and not via the Windows binaries? Wouldn't you want WPI to know which version(s) you have loaded?

To answer your questions, my initial plan was to replace PHP with the latest version. But it occurs to me that WPI may let you have multiple versions and configure each site to run its own? Is that true? In which case I only have need for 1 site to run 5.5 and the rest can stay on 5.4 for now. If it's easier to upgrade all, it should work fine.
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Dan McFaddenSystems EngineerCommented:
As I stated above, you can have multiple versions of PHP on an IIS web server.  Your web application just needs to be pointed to the version that is requires.

You could have 5 different PHP version installed in their own directories and 5 websites configured to use 1 of each of the 5 versions.

WPI is used mostly for installing packages, it has no uninstall options.  You can remove most packages installed with WPI thru the Control Panel and Programs and Features control.

As for PHP, if you installed PHP, you should have also installed PHP Manager for IIS.  What you can do is the following:

1. install the PHP version(s) that you require
2. go to each site that is running PHP and re-register the PHP version using the PHP Manager for IIS feature.
3. verify that the sites are still functional
4. if no sites are using a specific version of PHP, you can just delete the directory where that PHP version is installed.  WPI puts PHP in the following structures:

C:\Program Files (x86)\PHP\v5.3
C:\Program Files (x86)\PHP\v5.4
C:\Program Files (x86)\PHP\v5.5
C:\Program Files (x86)\PHP\v5.6

Just delete the version you are no longer using.

Hopefully this explanation helps clarify things...

Dan
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street9009Author Commented:
Thank you!
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