FreeBSD PHP 5.6 ports

FreeBSD ports subtree to build packages for the unsupported (EoL) PHP 5.6 version.

Updated to the latest PHP version 5.6.40.

Preparation

To build the packages you need to add the following to /etc/make.conf:

DEFAULT_VERSIONS += php=5.6

# Needed for PHP 5.6 because it was removed from the tree.
PHP_EXT_DIR=    20131226
PHP_EXT_INC=    pcre spl
_USE_PHP_VER56= bcmath bitset bz2 calendar ctype curl dba dom \
                bcmath bz2 calendar ctype curl dba dom \
                enchant exif fileinfo filter ftp gd gettext gmp \
                hash iconv imap interbase intl json ldap mbstring mcrypt \
                mssql mysql mysqli odbc opcache \
                openssl pcntl pcre pdo pdo_dblib pdo_firebird pdo_mysql \
                pdo_odbc pdo_pgsql pdo_sqlite pgsql phar posix \
                pspell readline recode session shmop simplexml snmp soap \
                sockets spl sqlite3 sybase_ct sysvmsg sysvsem sysvshm \
                tidy tokenizer wddx xml xmlreader xmlrpc xmlwriter xsl zip zlib
mysql_DEPENDS=  databases/php${PHP_VER}-mysql

Then extract this subtree somewhere in the filesystem (here /opt/ports/php56):

mkdir -p /opt/ports/php56
git clone https://github.com/mariancerny/freebsd-ports-php56.git /opt/ports/php56

Installing

Now you can build individual packages:

cd /opt/ports/php56/lang/php56
make install

cd /opt/ports/php56/www/mod_php56
make install

Caveats

Dependencies within this PHP 5.6 ports subtree are not resolved properly. You must install each dependency beforehand.

For example if you try to build databases/php56-pdo_mysql first you get the following error:

===>   php56-pdo_mysql-5.6.40 depends on file: /usr/local/lib/php/20131226/pdo.so - not found
Error a dependency refers to a non existing origin: /usr/ports/databases/php56-pdo in BUILD_DEPENDS
Errors with dependencies.
*** Error code 1

Stop.
make[1]: stopped in /opt/ports/php56/databases/php56-pdo_mysql

You must install databases/php56-pdo manually before installing databases/php56-pdo_mysql. Similarilly you must install textproc/php56-xml before textproc/php56-xmlreader, etc.

You can even install the meta port lang/php56-extensions (for example when you need to export the packages using pkg create & pkg repo), you must just install all the selected packages manually beforehand.

Another option would be to mount the repository using unionfs onto /usr/ports (as suggested by TLINDEN), e.g.:

mount -t unionfs -o ro /opt/ports/php56 /usr/ports

Then all dependencies build automatically just fine.

Testing

Tested on FreeBSD 11.2 and 12.0 with main FreeBSD ports tree from May 2019.

It may break in a future version of the main FreeBSD ports tree. Hopefully, it will last for some time.

Update: Still works on FreeBSD 12.4 with freebsd-ports tree branch 2023Q4.