How To Install Zend Server 6 on a CentOS 6.4 VPS

Status: Deprecated

This article covers a version of CentOS that is no longer supported. If you are currently operating a server running CentOS 6, we highly recommend upgrading or migrating to a supported version of CentOS.

Reason: CentOS 6 reached end of life (EOL) on November 30th, 2020 and no longer receives security patches or updates. For this reason, this guide is no longer maintained.

See Instead:
This guide might still be useful as a reference, but may not work on other CentOS releases. If available, we strongly recommend using a guide written for the version of CentOS you are using.

What the Red Means

The lines that the user needs to enter or customize will be in red in this tutorial!

The rest should mostly be copy-and-pastable.

About Zend Server 6

Zend Server 6 is the latest (as of this writing) production ready server management tool from Zend for PHP. It offers many convenient ways to manage your applications built using PHP. From the administration panel you can view logs, configure PHP, view server information and much more. There are many management tools available for advanced users with the Enterprise license that can help with managing multiple servers and much more. Best of all, the Community Edition is free for everyone, even on a production server.

Prerequisites

The following prerequisites have been made for the course of this tutorial:

• A VPS running with either CentOS 6.4 x64 or x32.
• You know how to SSH into your cloud server as root or some other user which has the ability to install packages.
• You want to install Zend Server 6 with PHP version 5.3 or 5.4.
• You are familiar with vi for editing files.

Step 1 - Prepare Yum

Add a repo file for the Zend repository so yum can find the package to install:

vi /etc/yum.repos.d/zend.repo

Your file should be open in vi for editing (press i to go into edit mode). Enter the following details for the Zend repository:

[Zend]
name=Zend Server 
baseurl=http://repos.zend.com/zend-server/6.0/rpm/$basearch
enabled=1
gpgcheck=1
gpgkey=http://repos.zend.com/zend.key


[Zend_noarch]
name=Zend Server - noarch
baseurl=http://repos.zend.com/zend-server/6.0/rpm/noarch
enabled=1
gpgcheck=1
gpgkey=http://repos.zend.com/zend.key

Now save the file by pressing the escape key followed by :wq to write the file and close vi.

The repository file describes how you get the package for installation.

The name section is arbitrary and is used for describing this repo.

The baseurl is the location yum will look when searching for the desired package.

The $basesearch variable is used by yum to find the right package for the system it is installing on your virtual private server.

The enabled flag determines if it is enabled for yum to use.

The gpgcheck flag tells yum to check the signature of the file it downloads against the gpgkey supplied by the vendor.

The _noarch section provides the same information for any data which is platform or architecture independent, such as graphics or documentation.

Step 2 - Install Zend Server

Now that yum can find the repository for Zend Server, you can install the package of your choice. Zend Server 6 can be installed with your choice of PHP version 5.3 or 5.4. Both commands will be listed.

To install PHP version 5.4 run the following:

yum install zend-server-php-5.4

To install PHP version 5.3 run the following:

yum install zend-server-php-5.3

When prompted by the installation, you can enter yes to all the prompts, unless you know what you want to do differently.

Step 3 - Verify Installation

Once the installation has completed, you can verify that Zend Server has been installed correctly by visiting the web UI. For the following examples, replace 1.1.1.1 with your VPS IP address or domain.

You can also verify Apache is running by visiting the IP address or domain of your VPS without the Zend Server 10081 port.

http://1.1.1.1

The following page should appear:

Open a browser and go to the IP address or domain of your VPS with the Zend Server UI port of 10081:

http://1.1.1.1:10081

The license agreement screen should appear. Read the license and then check the agreement checkbox and click the "Next" button:

You will then be presented with the launch type for the Zend Server. When choosing your launch type for Zend Server, keep the following in mind:

Development This launch type will display any error which occurs in PHP. This includes warnings, fatal errors, and strict errors. Normally, you would not want this to occur in a production environment. By displaying all errors your users would see all these warning messages regardless of whether or not you intend to make that information public. With your server in this mode, you could end up with display issues when a simple warning gets returned by some code that you were not expecting. With that said, the Development launch type is especially handy when you are working on an application. It can provide feedback you would normally need to look into the error logs to find. The immediate feedback of displaying the errors can help speed up bug tracking.

Production (Single Server) This launch type will suppress all errors from the user and keep the memory usage for bug traces to a minimum so you are not cluttering your system with unneeded or overly large logs. The same errors that would be displayed to the user in a Development launch type will now only be accessible by finding the correct log file. This is one area that the Zend Server admin UI becomes quite useful. Also in the Production launch type, 127.0.0.1 is the only allowed host for connection to the Zend debugger.

Production (Create or Join a Cluster) This launch type allows you to create a cluster of multiple Zend Servers or join an existing cluster. In this mode, you have more control over multiple servers running Zend Server. All with the same settings as a Zend Server running as a Production (Single Server) launch type. This is also only available with an Enterprise Zend Server license or during the 30 day trial period for any new installation such as this. After 30 days, your Enterprise trial license will expire and your server will run as the Community Edition. So unless you are planning on buying an Enterprise license or you are trying the functionality out, I would suggest not using this launch type:

Next (if you did not choose Production Cluster), you will be prompted to enter your passwords. The admin password is required. You can skip the developer password if you are planning to use Zend Server Community Edition:

Finally, you will be presented with a summary of the configurations you have chosen. Click submit and wait for Zend Server to launch:

If everything went smoothly, you should be at the Zend Server admin UI welcome screen:

Your Zend Server installation is complete and you can start using it to configure PHP on your cloud server.

Reference Paths and Files

Zend Server uses its own location for installing PHP and Apache. The following paths can come in handy:

Location of Zend Server installation:

cd /usr/local/zend

Location of vhost files:

cd /usr/local/zend/etc/sites.d

Apache configuration file:

/etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf

Reference Commands

Here are Zend Server specific commands:

Start Zend Server:

/usr/local/zend/bin/zendctl.sh start

Stop Zend Server:

/usr/local/zend/bin/zendctl.sh stop

Retart Zend Server:

/usr/local/zend/bin/zendctl.sh restart

Start Apache:

/usr/local/zend/bin/zendctl.sh start-apache

Stop Apache:

/usr/local/zend/bin/zendctl.sh stop-apache

Restart Apache:

/usr/local/zend/bin/zendctl.sh restart-apache

Resources

To find out more about the server launch types you can visit Zend's documentation here.