We received a lot of great feedback from the community on our first iteration of EasyApache 4 and MultiPHP in 11.52! Many users tested it out with their own configurations, and many systems now use EasyApache 4.
Our experience so far
Despite the ‘Technical Preview’ warning in 52, EasyApache 4 is quite stable. The biggest current pain point is the migration process from EA3 to EA4.
If you use the default EasyApache 3 profile, the migration is fairly straightforward. We encourage users to try the migration process and let us know your results. The more reports we have, the better we can make this process!
We’re working to ensure that your EA4 profile matches your EA3 profile as much as possible. EasyApache 3 contains a lot of ‘builtins’, so making sure everything matches up perfectly is our primary concern. If you are familiar with package management on Red Hat systems, managing an EasyApache 4 instance hasn’t been a problem. If EasyApache 4 doesn’t work out like you had hoped for some reason, reverting back to your previous EasyApache 3 profile is easy.
How we improved it
Migrations
We rewrote the migration script significantly so that we could better analyze your EasyApache 3 installation, and select the proper packages for EA4. While most options in EA3 are available in EA4, if there are any conflicts or complications, the migration script will tell you about those up front and allow you to choose how to proceed. The script also performs some basic checks to make reverting an EA4 migration much easier.
EasyApache 4 User Interface
We added a lot of new options to the EasyApache 4 User Interface in WHM. These changes made the interface much easier to use. You’ll see inner pages to select individual packages on the server, including PHP extensions, MPMs and more!
MultiPHP PHP Handlers User Interface
We added a ‘PHP Handlers’ tab to the MultiPHP Manager interface. This new UI allows you to quickly and easily change Apache handlers for each installed PHP version. This interface includes built in error checking for configuration conflicts, so if something isn’t going to work right, the UI will let you know before you apply!
MultiPHP Refactor
We also did a lot of work behind the scenes to allow for easier expansion of future web servers and languages. While these changes are mostly invisible, they give us the ability to add more programming language support to the web server and support web servers other than just Apache. We haven’t added any additional servers or languages yet, but will in the future.
With the recent changes and improvements we’ve made to EasyApache 4 and the migration suite, we’re promoting EasyApache 4 from ‘Technical Preview’ to ‘Beta’. This brings us one step closer to being production ready, and will hopefully allow us to receive more feedback about the platform and how it can be improved for your hosting requirements.
Future Plans
PHP7
We are currently working on PHP 7 and will release it to EasyApache 4’s experimental repository soon.
MultiPHP PECL & PEAR Support
We are working on full PECL & PEAR support for EasyApache 4 so that users and administrators can easily install compiled and uncompiled extensions for websites for each PHP version.
EasyApache 4 & CloudLinux Integration
We’ve heard your requests for CloudLinux integration. This is something we will be working on soon, so stay tuned for more information! We hope fully support CloudLinux in cPanel & WHM 56.
EasyApache 4 as default EasyApache with cPanel & WHM
While we may not be ready for everyone to install EA4 by default in cPanel & WHM yet, we are preparing for this. We hope to start allowing customers to choose to install EA4 by default on fresh installations.
Nginx
Nginx will be one of the first caching systems that we work on. We don’t have much information about this yet, but when we get closer to working on it we will let you know.
To stay updated on the latest information about EasyApache 4, visit our documentation page here: Current Status of EasyApache 4
