To maximise compatibility, we have many versions of PHP already installed on our servers.
To set the version of PHP for your website, just add the following to your site's .htaccess file.
You can find the .htaccess file in either the top-most directory for your site, or the public_html folder:
For PHP 4:
SetEnv DEFAULT_PHP_VERSION 4
For PHP 5.2:
SetEnv DEFAULT_PHP_VERSION 5
For PHP 5.3:
SetEnv DEFAULT_PHP_VERSION 53
For PHP 5.4:
SetEnv DEFAULT_PHP_VERSION 54
For PHP 5.5:
SetEnv DEFAULT_PHP_VERSION 55
This should always be at the top of a .htaccess file.
Remember that the .htaccess file of a subfolder will always override the one in its parent folder, so if the version as set as 5.3 in one folder, and afolder containing the site within that folder contains another .htaccess file that specifies PHP 5.2 to be used, PHP 5.2 will be the one that's used.
You can use this to set sub-sites within a website to use different versions of PHP.
To set the PHP version for when running a cron command
The above just tells Apache what the default version of PHP should be on a website, and so doesn't take affect command lines such as those used in cron tasks.
If you need to run a PHP file as a cron task using a specific version of PHP, you just need to specify the version in the path to the interpreter.
These are as follow:
For PHP 4:
/usr/bin/php4 /the/path/to/the/php/file/to/be/run AndArgument1 AndArgument2
For PHP 5.2:
/usr/bin/php5 /the/path/to/the/php/file/to/be/run AndArgument1 AndArgument2
For PHP 5.3:
/usr/bin/php53 /the/path/to/the/php/file/to/be/run AndArgument1 AndArgument2
For PHP 5.4:
/usr/bin/php54 /the/path/to/the/php/file/to/be/run AndArgument1 AndArgument2
For PHP 5.5:
/usr/bin/php55 /the/path/to/the/php/file/to/be/run AndArgument1 AndArgument2
