Manual:Common errors and symptoms/PCRE

When you try to install or upgrade to MediaWiki 1.22 or later, you may receive the following error message:

Fatal: PCRE newer version or later is required. Your PHP binary is linked with version older version.

This issue may occur if you are using an older Linux distribution (one having an older version of PCRE than that bundled with PHP) and PHP is compiled with the  configure option. In particular, the  packages from Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 (and derivatives such as CentOS and Scientific Linux) are broken in this regard. MediaWiki uses features introduced in the newer version of PCRE and no longer works with older versions of the library.

Below are several methods to upgrade the PCRE library your PHP installation uses.

Installing newer PHP packages
For Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 and its derivatives, you can use any of several third-party package repositories for installing newer versions of PHP. These newer builds are compiled without the option in question. Note that these packages are not supported by Red Hat, by any other Linux vendor, or by the MediaWiki developers.


 * http://iuscommunity.org/pages/About.html
 * http://blog.famillecollet.com/pages/Config-en
 * https://fedorahosted.org/SoftwareCollections/

Recompiling PHP from source
If you compiled PHP yourself using the source code from php.net, you should be able to recompile it to use the newer, bundled version of PCRE:
 * Run  again without the   option
 * Run  and/or   again