Upgrade PHP 5.5.x to 5.6.11 on windows 7

Question

I'm trying to upgrade my existing PHP 5.5.x to 5.6.11 on windows 7 manually. I'm not interested in XAMPP for now. PHP 5.5.x is currently installed and works fine locally on my machine i.e. http://localhost

I grabbed a copy of php-5.6.11-Win32-VC11-x86 from http://windows.php.net/download/ un-packed the windows binaries and put them where my current ones are e.g. C:\php

I use my current .ini file for all intents and purposes and copy that across also. It should now be a simple case of restarting the server with my upgrade successful - only the server fails to start with 'The requested operation has failed!' and no errors reported in my Apache logs?

Nothing has changed in my httpd.conf

LoadModule php5_module "c:/php/php5apache2_4.dll"
AddHandler application/x-httpd-php .php
# configure the path to php.ini
PHPIniDir "C:/php"

What's strange is when I go to the terminal

$ php -v
PHP 5.6.11 (cli) (built: Jul  9 2015 20:55:40)
Copyright (c) 1997-2015 The PHP Group
Zend Engine v2.6.0, Copyright (c) 1998-2015 Zend Technologies

So it appears that 5.6.11 IS installed, indeed $ php -h reveals a host of information but Apache fails to start with no clues?

How do I complete the upgrade?

Answer 1

It turns out I needed the 64 bit version - it now works!