installing php.5.5 with mcrypt on AWS Linux - php

Question

This is kind of a n00b question, but I'm a much better developer than a sys admin.
Im setting up an Amazon Linux instance on EC2 and can't seem to get php 5.5 with mcrypt installed. yum seems to throw php 5.3 at me each time i try to do a group install or just as a dependency of mcrypt.
Any suggestions? This is for a Laravel 4.1 application.
Thanks!

Answer 1

If you are using amazon linux, you will need to install the php packages that start with php55.
Older packages are kept for compatability.

Answer 2

Since start configuring an EC2 instance can be tricky and indeed there is not much available support or documentation at the date I'm writting this answer, I'll post the steps I followed that worked for me. So I hope it will be useful to someone else:
Start an EC2 instance as described on the AWS documentation. Do not use elastic beanstalk for deploying your php app.
Start you PuTTY session, it is well described on the AWS documentation.
When PuTTY session is on, install in the following order: apache server (v 2.4), php55, php55-mcrypt, php55-pdo and mysql55
sudo yum install httpd24
sudo yum install php55
sudo yum install php55-mcrypt
sudo yum install php55-pdo
sudo yum install mysql55
Check your server properly working sudo service httpd start. If succesfully installed, you'll see 'OK' and you should be able to see a sample page in the public DNS.
Add a group in order to allow "ec2-user" modifying and writing files inside var/www/html
sudo groupadd www
sudo usermod -a -G www ec2-user
Exit PuTTY and reenter again (so changes will be applied) exit
Reconnect and check membership
groups
Modify permissions on writing and editing files
sudo chown -R root:www /var/www
sudo chmod 2775 /var/www
find /var/www -type d -exec sudo chmod 2775 {} +
find /var/www -type f -exec sudo chmod 0664 {} +
Test your server
echo "<?php phpinfo(); ?>" > /var/www/html/phpinfo.php
sudo service httpd restart
visit http://publicdomain/phpinfo.php. If properly working (it should) it will display the php info page.
All these steps worked well for me after hours dealing with php versions that are not compatible with laravel 4.1>=