Managing ea-phpxx and alt-phpxx Configuration Differences Between v5.3 and Previous Versions

The PHP handlers are configured differently in LiteSpeed Web Server v5.3 than they were in previous versions of LSWS. If you've upgraded from v.5.2.x or earlier, you may need to make some adjustments to your handler configuration.

In previous versions of LiteSpeed Web Server, there was no separate handler between alt-phpxx and ea-phpxx. Both used the ea-phpxx handler, no matter which handler was actually specified.

AddType application/x-httpd-alt-php70 .php .php7 .phtml

AddType application/x-httpd-ea-php70 .php .php7 .phtml

Both of these commands resulted in the ea-php70 handler being used.

LiteSpeed's current version specifically adds alt-phpxx (CloudLinux PHP selector) handler suppport for cPanel and CloudLinux systems. Hence, alt-phpxx and ea-phpxx must be treated separately.

This allows LSWS to get along better with cPanel's multi-PHP manager better, since either alt-phpxx or ea-phpxx can be selected for a domain now. cPanel will add the following to .htaccess, depending on which PHP was selected, and LSWS will honor the user's choice of alt-phpxx or ea-phpxx:

AddType application/x-httpd-alt-php70 .php .php7 .phtml

AddType application/x-httpd-ea-php70 .php .php7 .phtml

Let's say you set all lsphpxx binaries to use alt-phpxx for all handlers, and then set some per-directory phpto use ea-phpxx in .htaccess, like so:

AddType application/x-httpd-ea-php54 .php .php7 .phtml

or

<FilesMatch ".(php4|php5|php3|php2|php|phtml)$">
SetHandler application/x-httpd-ea-php54
</FilesMatch>

Let's also say the server only has ea-php70 installed, and another ea-phpXX handler is not available.

The following:

SetHandler application/x-httpd-ea-php54

or

SetHandler application/x-httpd-ea-php55

would work with LSWS v5.2.x and earlier, but would fail with LSWS v5.3 and later.

As mentioned, the old way is to treat ea-phpXX and alt-phpXX the same. They are handled by the lsphpXX handler which points to the alt-php binary, and all is well.

The new way is to treat the ea-phpXX handler and alt-phpXX handler separately, and so it fails because ea-phpXX is not available.

There are two ways to fix this problem.

In .htaccess, change:

SetHandler application/x-httpd-ea-php54

to

SetHandler application/x-httpd-alt-php54

This method allows you to use the correct handler moving forward, but it can be a little time consuming to change all handler settings in all .htaccess while migrating from v5.2.x to v5.3.

Update the name of the lsphpXX external app from lsphpXX to ea-phpXX. The executable path is still pointing to the alt-php binary. This way, ea-phpXX, alt-phpXX, and lsphpXX are all handled by alt-php handlers.