Hello, I'm reinstalling a Centos6 dedicated server with plesk and I would really really like to go with the most current php 5.4 and apache 2.4.1. I'm also considering cloudlinux and a mysql replacement like paragon/mariadb, etc. Trouble is I keep running into dependency hell when installing plesk since it wants to install it's version of php, apache, mysql and since there is no apache 2.4.1 rpm I have to install it from source, which means the plesk install won't see it etc. Is there no way to tell plesk to use the system provided software rather than imposing it's versions? Or is there a recommended order to this like install plesk then upgrade/change these components? I've tried that route before and it usually means plesk will break with updates later etc. Any guidance would be really appreciated.

You'll have to roll your own RPM packages or find someone who provides them for your distribution. You could also maybe try installing some dummy packages (containing no files) for the Apache, PHP and MySQL packages and then just actually do installs directly from source, although I wouldn't recommend doing that.

And then you need to make sure it's all compatible with Plesk. Of course you get to keep the pieces when things break, since Plesk doesn't officially support this stack.

Well apache 2.4.1 and PHP 5.4 arent compatible yet so you might want to hold off there. If you want to push it though, I have httpd 2.4.1 packages in the atomic-testing channel.

Other things to be aware with httpd 2.4.1, all DSO modules (perl, python, php, ruby, fcgi, etc) will need to be rebuilt against the newer API. Pretty much if its not a module from the httpd-2.4.1 src.rpm, youve got to rebuild it.

Provided you're packaging everything correctly, plesk is going to work with these at a base level (IE it will detect them, it will display, allow you to stop/start, etc). The only tricky parts, and I think these are when the newer apache or php package has deprecated a configuration token that causes a hard error that prevents the daemon from starting/DSO from loading. To fix that you just need to tie into the plesk API to make a correction after the fact.

Replacing mysql completely might not be an option, at least for the psa & horde databases. You could certainly limit plesk's interaction to just that daemon, and then install paragon or mariadb in parallel for your userland components. Again, tying into the API here is a workaround if there is a major change between the two (creating users, databases, etc)

In the interim, we do have php 5.3.10, and httpd 2.2.22 packages in the repo. Those are both completely compatible with plesk 8.6 and up.

Okay thanks for the info. I guess I'll stick with the stable stuff. Just thought I'd get the most bang for the reinstall buck so to speak