Building your own php, apache etc

[neo81]

Hello!

I'm using Centos 6.8 (Final) for now. Is it ok to build your own php, apache, git etc? I'm not talking about possibility rather about supportability. How far can we go? Are there any deprecated practices?

Thank you.

[TrevorH]

Yes, it's possible.
No, it's not a good idea.

If you were to go down this route then you would need to subscribe to all the upstream mailing lists that inform you about new versions being released so that you can pull down that update and rebuild your version of the package. If you don't do that then you will be running a version of the package without whatever the latest security fix was. Repeat this for every package that you decide to rebuild from scratch and soon you will be doing nothing but rebuild a deploy.

Or alternatively, you stick with the CentOS provided packages and get automatic security updates that are a simple yum update away. Redhat take care of all the rest.

If you just want newer versions of some of the packages that CentOS distributes then look at some of the other third party repos that already exist. For things like httpd/php and even git, the IUS Community repo already provides newer versions - for example, IUS contains httpd24u-2.4.23-2.ius.centos6, php70u, php56u and git2u packages. These are designed to replace the CentOS ones although they are named differently to stop that from happening accidentally. The IUS repo has a team of people that check for newer versions and they make them available within a short space of time.

[neo81]

Thank you, TrevorH!