Downgrading to PHP 5.3 on Debian Wheezy (7.0)

Debian Wheezy comes with PHP 5.4. If this is too new for your application and it doesn’t work properly, here is a short description on downgrading to PHP 5.3.

• First, add these two lines to /etc/apt/sources.list. In short, it adds Debian Squeeze repositories as an additional source of packages:

deb http://archive.debian.org/debian/ squeeze-lts main contrib non-free
deb http://archive.debian.org/debian/ squeeze main contrib non-free

• Then, add these to pin your old PHP 5.3 packages, to /etc/apt/preferences.d/preferences. If you don’t have this file, create an empty one.

Package: php5*
Pin: version 5.3*
Pin-Priority: 700

Package: libapache2-mod-php5
Pin: version 5.3*
Pin-Priority: 700

Package: php-pear
Pin: version 5.3*
Pin-Priority: 700

Package: php-apc
Pin: version 3.1.3p*
Pin-Priority: 700

Package: *
Pin: release a=stable
Pin-Priority: 600

• This will list your PHP packages

# PHP=$(dpkg -l|grep php|grep 5.4.4|awk '{print $2}')
# echo $PHP

• Finally, reinstall:

# apt-get update

# apt-get install --reinstall $PHP
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
The following extra packages will be installed:
libicu44 libjpeg62 libmagickcore3 libmagickwand3 libmysqlclient16 libt1-5 php5-suhosin
Suggested packages:
libmagickcore3-extra php5-dev
The following NEW packages will be installed:
libicu44 libjpeg62 libmagickcore3 libmagickwand3 libmysqlclient16 libt1-5 php5-suhosin
The following packages will be DOWNGRADED:
libapache2-mod-php5 php-apc php-pear php5 php5-cgi php5-cli php5-common php5-curl php5-gd php5-imagick php5-imap php5-intl php5-mcrypt php5-mysql
0 upgraded, 7 newly installed, 4 reinstalled, 14 downgraded, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 30.5 MB of archives.
After this operation, 30.9 MB of additional disk space will be used.
Do you want to continue [Y/n]?