CentOS 5.5 is dependant on Python 2.4. Everything will break if you change it, so we must install a newer version of Python in a different place.

Surprisingly my 1&1 CentOS didn’t come with gcc installed so I had to install it myself.

yum -y install gcc gdbm-devel readline-devel ncurses-devel zlib-devel bzip2-devel sqlite-devel db4-devel openssl-devel tk-devel bluez-libs-devel make

Important: Before you go any further please read Upgrading Plesk from PSA_10.2.0 to PSA_10.3.0

I’m going to need the MySQL development libraries so install them next:

yum -y install mysql-devel

The big surprise here was that it installed PHP 5.3 as a dependency! which I was not expecting, but everything still seems to be working!

Now that we have the platform set up, we’ll download all the sources we need and unpack them.

1. Create a folder for us to work in:

   mkdir /home/mrn/dev/python
   cd /home/mrn/dev/python

2. Go to the Python download page:
   http://www.python.org/download/releases/
3. Download and uncompress:

   wget http://www.python.org/ftp/python/2.7.1/Python-2.7.1.tar.bz2
   tar -xjvf Python-2.7.1.tar.bz2

4. Go to the Python MySQL module page:
   http://sourceforge.net/projects/mysql-python/
5. Download and uncompress:

   wget http://sourceforge.net/projects/mysql-python/files/mysql-python/1.2.3/MySQL-python-1.2.3.tar.gz
   tar -xzvf MySQL-python-1.2.3.tar.gz

6. Download the Easy Installer set up:

   wget http://peak.telecommunity.com/dist/ez_setup.py

Build Python

1. Go to Python folder:

   cd Python-2.7.1

2. Check there is nothing already living in /usr/local/python27 because that is where we are going to install out copy of Python.
3. Run the source configuration program:

   ./configure –prefix=/usr/local/python27

4. Start the build:

   make

5. Install (as root):

   make install

If you don’t have root privileges then you can change the −−prefix to a location where you can write.

Ok, to test it we’ll try to start the interactive prompt:

# /usr/local/python27/bin/python
Python 2.7.1 (r271:86832, Jun 2 2011, 16:02:46)
[GCC x.x.x xxxxxxxxx (xxxxx x.x.x-xx)] on xxxxx
Type “help", “copyright", “credits” or “license” for more information.

We must add python to our PATH so that the next part will pick up our new python and not the old one.

# export PATH=/usr/local/python27/bin:$PATH

As a prerequisite for the Python MySQL’s module we need to install setuptools. There is a really handy video on ShowMeDo here on how to do it. Don’t forget to run this as root (if you installed it as root) because it will modify the Python installation directory. The import should return without an error.

# cd ..
# python ez_setup.py

To test it, try to import setuptools.

# /usr/local/python27/bin/python
Python 2.7.1 (r271:86832, Jun 2 2011, 16:02:46)
[GCC x.x.x xxxxxxxxx (xxxxx x.x.x-xx)] on xxxxx
Type “help", “copyright", “credits” or “license” for more information.
>>> import setuptools
>>>

Compile the MySQL module

Now that we have sorted out the Python installation go to the MySQL Python directory. The site.py default file doesn’t need changing so we can use it as is. There is the option to change the MySQL Python module name from _mysql to something else but there’s not much point because every example you’ll find on the Internet has it as the default; you’ll spend the rest of your life searching and replacing! Again you’ll have to run this as root if you did earlier.

# cd MySQL-python-1.2.3
# python setup.py build
# python setup.py install

To test it, try to import _mysql, it should return without an error.

# /usr/local/python27/bin/python
Python 2.7.1 (r271:86832, Jun 2 2011, 16:02:46)
[GCC x.x.x xxxxxxxxx (xxxxx x.x.x-xx)] on xxxxx
Type “help", “copyright", “credits” or “license” for more information.
>>> import setuptools
>>>

The first time I did this I got the following error message, but after I’d logged out and logged back in again the error message went away and I couldn’t reproduce it.

/usr/local/python27/lib/python2.7/site-packages/MySQL_python-1.2.3-py2.7-linux-x86_64.egg/_mysql.py:3: UserWarning: Module _mysql was already imported from /usr/local/python27/lib/python2.7/site-packages/MySQL_python-1.2.3-py2.7-linux-x86_64.egg/_mysql.pyc, but /home/djn/dev/python/MySQL-python-1.2.3 is being added to sys.path

The unexpected upgrade of PHP from version 5.1 to 5.3 threw up the following error message on all my .php pages:

SYSTEM WARNING: date_default_timezone_get() [function.date-default-timezone-get]: It is not safe to rely on the system’s timezone settings. You are *required* to use the date.timezone setting or the date_default_timezone_set() function. In case you used any of those methods and you are still getting this warning, you most likely misspelled the timezone identifier. We selected ‘Europe/London’ for ‘BST/1.0/DST’ instead

Fixed it by adding the following line to /etc/php.ini and restarting the web server.

date.timezone = ‘Europe/London’