How do I downgrade PHP 5.4 to 5.3 using Bitnami Cloud hosting

After finding a Joomla plugin we required was not quite compatible w/ PHP 5.4, we needed to downgrade the server to PHP 5.3 without having to recreate the whole server.

Bitnami pre-builds their AMI images without using apt-get or dpkg, so it was a matter of manually installing the retro version of php5 in parallel with the Bitnami/Ubuntu version and manually editing associated Apache conf file to update the DocumentRoot and port settings.

Running something like this gets PHP 5.3 with Apache installed:

sudo apt-get install php5=5.3.10-1ubuntu3.5 php5-cli=5.3.10-1ubuntu3.5 php5-common=5.3.10-1ubuntu3.5 libapache2-mod-php5=5.3.10-1ubuntu3.5 php-pear=5.3.10-1ubuntu3.5 php5-curl=5.3.10-1ubuntu3.5 php5-gd=5.3.10-1ubuntu3.5 php5-intl=5.3.10-1ubuntu3.5 php5-mysql=5.3.10-1ubuntu3.5 php5-pspell=5.3.10-1ubuntu3.5 php5-recode=5.3.10-1ubuntu3.5 php5-snmp=5.3.10-1ubuntu3.5 php5-sqlite=5.3.10-1ubuntu3.5 php5-tidy=5.3.10-1ubuntu3.5 php5-xmlrpc=5.3.10-1ubuntu3.5 php5-xsl=5.3.10-1ubuntu3.5

And to find the right version by checking your local cache, try the following (ours was 5.3.10-1ubuntu3.5).

bitnami@ip-10-0-0-1:~$ apt-cache showpkg php5

Package: php5 
Versions: 
**5.3.10-1ubuntu3.5** (/var/lib/apt/lists/us-east-1.ec2.archive.ubuntu.com_ubuntu_dists_precise-updates_main_binary-amd64_Packages) (/var/lib/apt/lists/security.ubuntu.com_ubuntu_dists_precise-security_main_binary-amd64_Packages) (/var/lib/dpkg/status)  
...

In our case, we left Bitnami's default installation of httpd in place which uses PHP 5.4.10 on port 80.

We then installed PHP 5.3 to use port 81 using apt-get because for compatibility testing.

We also decided to install a third version of PHP 5.4.11 on port 82 which came with Bitnami's LAMP stack:

wget http://downloads.bitnami.org/files/stacks/lampstack/5.4.12-0/bitnami-lampstack-5.4.12-0-linux-x64-installer.run

In short, we now have the same Joomla site being serviced by 3 versions of PHP for testing depending on which port is being referenced. Each site uses the same Mysqld database and the same physical Joomla files.

I am not so sure this would have been so easy without Bitnami's architecture being so flexible, but it proven to be very handy as we develop the site and test the plugins.