Custom configure flags on PHP

[gnif]

I have been fighting with cPanel for the past 4 hours trying to get unixODBC support into PHP. What a nightmare, VERY un-impressed that it is not an option in easyapache.

Anyway, through some deductive work I have managed to find what seems to be an un-documented environment variable that can be used to set custom flags, perfect for what I need.

export CUSOTM_PHP_FLAGS="--with-unixODBC=/usr/lib/"
easyapache

Just thought I would let people know.

[Spiral]

Why in the world are you using EasyApache to compile PHP?

EasyApache completely screws up PHP installations even in the newest EasyApache3
and I wouldn't recommend using it for any but the most basic of PHP installations
and even then I would still be a bit leary about using EasyApache for PHP installations.

To Cpanel's credit, they have improved things quite a bit in terms of Apache compiling with
the newest EasyApache but it still sucks, for lack of a better word, where PHP is concerned
and I would recommend people only use EasyApache for Apache compiling alone and
choose "No PHP" as the option when running EasyApache.

For your PHP setup, it is actually much easier and far more reliable to just manually
compile PHP yourself from source downloaded from php.net ...

cd /usr/local/src

wget http://us2.php.net/get/php-5.2.3.tar.gz/from/www.php.net/mirror
tar zxvf php-5.2.3.tar.gz

cd php-5.2.3

./configure (whatever options you want go here)

make 
make test
make install

If you are unsure what options to put in the "./configure" command,
just take a look at your current phpinfo() screen.

(Same basic steps for any other version of PHP)