Zend just released Zend Server 5.0 a couple of days ago. As it has been the case for the previous versions, when downloading you can choose to get a version with PHP 5.2 or 5.3.

The Zend Server is available on Linux, Mac OS X and Windows, covering the wide spectrum of  platforms making it an attractive development platform. This is specially important for Windows and Mac users where having a solid PHP installation is not so simple. The Zend Server comes with a complete PHP stack along with the most common extensions included. It also comes with a debugger which interfaces with Zend Studio allowing developers to put breakpoints in their PHP code.

Installation on my Mac with OS X went very smoothly. Everything was installed on /usr/local/zend. After completing the installation this is what I did to “fix” the installation for my needs:

• edited Apache’s config (/usr/local/zend/apache2/conf/httpd.conf) and added the following line so Apache listens on the standard web port.
  Listen 80
• Added my virtual hosts to conf/extra/httpd-vhosts.conf. Make sure this file is included in the main httpd.conf file with the following line:
  Include conf/extra/httpd-vhosts.conf
• edited Mysql’s config (/usr/local/zend/mysql/data/my.cnf) to allow network connections by commenting the line  skip-networking.
• I restarted Zend server which in turns restarts Apache and Mysql with sudo /usr/local/zend/bin/zendctl.sh restart
• I did notice that if you want to connect to mysql from PHP using localhost, it fails because it does not find the mysql.sock in /tmp. I fixed this by created a link with this command:
  sudo ln -s /usr/local/zend/mysql/tmp/mysql.sock /tmp/

That’s pretty much it. After a few minutes, I had PHP 5.3 running and my Symfony/Zend Framework projects were up and running. By having the latest version of PHP 5.3, I am now able to play around with the newly released alpha version of Symfony 2.0!