[mass-moving from Tools>MediaWiki-Vagrant to separate product. See bug 54041. Filter bugmail on this comment.]

Note: HHVM also kind of falls under the scope of this bug.

Setting aside Vagrant and Puppet for the moment: what is the proper way to specify the default PHP interpreter in Ubuntu?

apt-get allows you to specify the version of package to install. For example:

sudo apt-get install php5=5.5.3

Unfortunately it's only specific versions, meaning you can't do "php5>=5.4.9" or anything like that.

Also, you need to be using a version of Ubuntu that has the latest versions of PHP in the repository. (Only quantal and later have PHP 5.4, and only saucy has PHP 5.5.)

phpenv (https://github.com/phpenv/phpenv) provides an interesting way to install and manage multiple php interpreters. I have used it in the past to setup build and test servers for PECL extensions and other projects where having multiple php builds is useful. I think it's what Travis-CI uses as well to provide php matrix builds.

Bulk unassigning bugs from Ori.

In T118932#1831937, @bd808 wrote:

Semi-confusingly the version of phpenv at https://github.com/CHH/phpenv is the better version to use. The phpenv/phpenv version forked from the CHH version over "creative differences" and then stalled out in a not-quite-good state.

CI has the same need, T103786: Investigate installing php5.3 on trusty and/or debian instance.

@Legoktm solved it for CI via T126211 . Code included :)

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/c/mediawiki/vagrant/+/642641 was an attempt to do it via apt version pinning controlled by hiera, but it didn't go well.