Over the next weeks, we will be making a few EasyApache releases that are going to give you new features, as well as making some changes that we wanted you to be aware of. One of the new features has been a long time coming. We’ve been hard at work on EasyApache 4 and MultiPHP, and we appreciate your patience. Recently we’ve tackled some major bugs with the EA3 Apache and PHP stack, and we’re almost ready to release our new features!
The first major EasyApache release will be 3.30. It’s going to bring the latest version of PHP 5.6 to the table, with updated Zend Guard and IonCube loaders. This release of PHP 5.6 will only support CentOS 6 and CentOS 7.
EasyApache 3.30 will also provide an optmod for Zend OPcache. OPcache has been available since PHP 5.5+, but it needed a little tweaking of the configuration file to enable. EasyApache is going to place a commented out version of OpCache’s recommended settings into your global php configuration. This will make it quick and easy to enable OPcache after compiling it in. For more information on these settings, reading over PHP’s documentation will get you ready to go.
http://php.net/manual/en/book.opcache.php
http://php.net/manual/en/opcache.installation.php
We’re also updating ModSecurity to 2.9.0. This version of ModSecurity provides a lot of cool features and allows tighter integration with the existing ModSecurity tools in cPanel & WHM version 11.48+. To allow customers to use these new features, we are adding a RawOpt for ModSecurity. This will allow you to change configuration flags during the compilation of ModSecurity and enable these features. Head over to the SpiderLabs GitHub page for more information on ModSecurity 2.9.0’s features:
https://github.com/SpiderLabs/ModSecurity/releases/tag/v2.9.0-rc1
In a later EasyApache release, we’ll be updating the default EasyApache profile to use Apache 2.4 on fresh installations. You’ll soon notice the ‘Basic Apache 2.2’ and ‘Basic Apache 2.4’ profiles appear in your available profiles. cPanel & WHM will use the ‘Basic Apache 2.4’ profile for fresh installations starting with this release. If you would like to install Apache 2.2 on your fresh installations instead, simply upload a profile before running the installation script. For more information, check out the documentation for custom profiles.
http://documentation.cpanel.net/display/ALD/Installation+Guide+-+Preconfigure+Apache
Over the next few cPanel & WHM release cycles, EasyApache 4 will become the default system for maintaining and deploying your web stack. As EasyApache 4 will only provide Apache 2.4, we want to ensure that the migration process from EA3 to EA4 is as smooth and painless as possible. Currently, approximately 80% of cPanel servers use Apache 2.2. This is generally associated with EasyApache providing Apache 2.2 as the default profile. With default installations using Apache 2.4, we hope to bring more cPanel servers to the newer version. Please also remember, Apache 2.2 is not supported on CentOS 7.
Whew. Thanks for reading through all that. I’d love to get your feedback on the above, and any other web stack related topics you may have. I’d also be interested to hear about any issues that might have occurred during your own migrations from Apache 2.2 to Apache 2.4. This will help us better understand how you configure your systems, which will give us an advantage during the migration process. Head over to the forums to get the conversation going!
https://forums.cpanel.net/threads/upcoming-web-stack-changes.470451/
