Installing phpBB 3.3.2 Server Configuration Requirements

So, here I am – in the middle of a migration of all of my websites due to a needed host upgrade from CentOS 6 to CentOS 7. I won’t get into the politics of all of that right now except to say that I think IBM is making a mistake by moving CentOS 8 to Stream, but at least the currently advertised maintenance 2 support date for CentOS 7 is still listed as 06/30/2024.

Now, I’m in the process of moving my sites to a new server, and have the following versions installed, currently:
– MySQL 5.7.32
– Apache 2.4.46
– PHP 7.1.33
I installed phpBB from the package downloaded from phpbb.com, performed a database upgrade from the 3.0.11 database to the 3.3 database, which was a whole different process that was well documented here -> phpBB upgrade

With everything seemingly up and running, I hit a couple of issues that were resolved by simply rebuilding PHP with the correct options, which included the following:
– DOM/XML (php-xml)
– iconv (php-iconv)
– mbstring (php-mbstring)

I’m not sure what other dependencies that phpbb has, and maybe it’s documented somewhere, but it took me several hours of working with it, reviewing error logs, adjusting settings, etc until I found them all. Now I think it’s up and running on one of my boards with just a few modifications, now the conversion process for the big board is next!