It's not uncommon to need to be able to run a site that has been neglected for years or decades, often for upgrading, migrating, copying, or archiving purposes. But normally there are just too many errors and problems with these very old sites to get them to run with more recent PHP versions. And the oldest PHP version that ddev directly supports is PHP 5.6.
However, there are images of older PHP versions on hub.docker.com, and we can use them as third-party services to get the behavior we need, which is usually just being able to look at a site.
This recipe was explicitly tested on Drupal 4.7 and 5.x, both from the 2008-2010 timeframe. 5.x installation succeeded with this configuration and PHP 5.3. Drupal 4.7 installation (very manual) succeeeded with PHP 5.2. Another approach which I used initially is to build the site or recover it on an Ubuntu 12.04 VM.
The normal ddev approach is to run both Nginx/Apache and php-fpm in the same container. However, it doesn't have to be that way. Here we're using Apache in the regular ddev-webserver, but we've set the Apache config to proxy to a different container, a PHP container running one of the Devilbox PHP images.
This means that the php_version you have set in your .ddev/config.yaml is irrelevant; the actual PHP version is the one in the Devilbox container.
For example, on a Drupal site you'll want the code and the user-uploaded files from sites/default/files.
If you're just kicking the tires, you can use a Drupal 4.7 version with git clone -b 4.7.x https://git.drupal.org/project/drupal.git.
ddev config --project-type=php --webserver-type=apache-fpm --mariadb-version=5.5sets up your project.
Apache is required for the Devilbox PHP container to be used. The project type and MariaDB parameters are only needed if your project requires them.
If your docroot is not the default, make sure to set it correctly in the .ddev/config.yaml.
Copy the files from .ddev into your project's .ddev
For example cp -r .ddev/* /path/to/your/repo/.ddev
- apache/apache-site.conf, a generic apache configuration that points to the external PHP container for PHP execution.
- docker-compose.php.yaml adds the service itself.
- mysql/noutf8.cnf, turning off UTF8 in MariaDB. utf8mb4, required for most current sites, makes indexes too long on some older sites.
ddev start
Get your database dump and load it into the 'db' database. Use ddev import-db or any other technique you prefer.
If older databases have TYPE=MyISAM in the table creation stanzas, that will need to be edited out. However, it may be possible to configure MariaDB in the .ddev/mysql directory to provide MyISAM.
ddev takes no responsiblity for your settings files if you have type: php, so you'll need to configure your settings files. For example, on a Drupal 4.7 site, you'll need to add $db_url = 'mysql://db:db@db/db'; to the sites/default/settings.php file. Don't forget that the hostname is 'db', not 'localhost' as often defaulted on many installers. (User/password/database are also 'db'.)
Now, if you're paranoid, do a ddev restart (probably unnecessary) and begin to debug the problems you've uncovered.
The site you've set up can probably be used as a migration source, can be archived, converted to HTML with a sitesucker, etc.
You cannot set PHP settings in .htaccess unless PHP is running as an Apache module. When not run running as an Apache module, PHP loads settings from .user.ini. This is important for enabling Xdebug, because the .ddev/php/xdebug.ini file that normally controls Xdebug settings is not used by the Devilbox PHP container. See example.user.ini.
You may need another version of PHP. As noted in docker-compose.php.yaml, you can easily use 5.3, 5.4, or 5.5.
- OK, you know that these PHP versions are long out of support and this recipe is provided only to help you resurrect and port or hibernate an old site, not for presentation or production purposes.
- You definitely may have to do more than listed here to get your particular site going.
- I haven't experimented with getting PHP4 to work. Please provide a PR to this recipe if you get it to work.