Old pkg/port Archives?

I need to temporarily install PHP 5.5.9 in order to test an application upgrade. The installed version of the app is incompatible with PHP>5, and the current version is incompatible with PHP<7, so I need to upgrade to an intermediate version, upgrade PHP, and then do a final upgrade of the app to the current version, and I want to practice this procedure before I do it in production.

I've tried installing PHP 5.5.9 from source, but installation failed with
Code:
chmod: /usr/local/libexec/apache24/libphp5.so: No such file or directory
which I gather was a common occurrence when 5.5.9 was current. The recommended solution is to install mod_php5 from ports, but it's no longer in the ports tree.

Is there anywhere I can find the old port archived for the purpose of compatibility?
 
It used to be that pkg.freebsd.org allowed browsing for files where you could download a package with txz extension and use pkg add to add the package. Well that ended so I have no good solution to the problem.

There is a package archive on your computer if you have not run pkg clean.
/var/cache/pkg/
That is your best hope for finding an old package.

How old are we talking here?
 
Looking here mod_php55 that you want is from <2014.
 
Old pkg/port Archives? … PHP 5.5.9 …

The closest I could find, in an official archive, is php55-5.5.1.tbz at <http://ftp-archive.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD-Archive/ports/amd64/packages-9.2-release/lang/>.

Nonofficial​


Legacy areas elsewhere include:
 
for x86 you can get a bunch of them from old release dvd.iso which are still available
unfortunately there are no isos containing pkgs for armv[67]
 
The way I've always done this is use the VCS at the time (CVS, SVN, and now GIT) browsing the commit history for the commit that updated from the version I was looking for. In our git world you can git clone the ports repo from either the FreeBSD cgit repo or the github mirror.

Then, cd <your-just-cloned-git-repo>; git log --name-status www

git log automatically pipes output to less(1). Type in / (to search) followed by mod_php5. I just did this for you. mod_php55 was removed by commit 87a09e788fd713fb5c314f2fa9d9134fef902401. Note the preceding commit hash and git checkout that-commit-hash. Wait while it checks out that version of the ports tree. And voila, your www/mod_php55 is ripe for the taking. Copy it to your working ports tree and try to build it. Don't be surprised if it won't build. ports/Mk and any prerequisites will not be the same.

It might be worth a try or you might spend a lot good time on a failed endeavor which could have been spent on something more productive. It depends on how badly you want the old port and how much effort you might want to put into it to make the old port work with a modern FreeBSD and modern ports tree. The risk is spending a few hours (or days) of your life for no gain at all.

This is pretty much how we resurrect old ports or resurrect old base components as well.

The key question you need to answer is, how much time are you willing to spend on this? And what if the effort fails?
 
… what should admin do to FreeBSD.conf or elsewhere to permit pkg(8) to download from such repository? …

pkg.conf(5) EXAMPLES are outdated, but there's this hint:

/usr/local/etc/pkg/repos/

In parallel:


Someone should make a bug report for the manual page.
 
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