struggling to install PHP pecl on Centos

Question

I'm trying to install the php_http PHP extension on my CentOS server.

I have done:

yum install php-pear

But get:

No package php-pear available

Yet I can do:

pear

And get a list of commands from Pear.

Same for yum install pecl. I can do pecl but pecl install pecl_http returns:

No releases available for package "pecl.php.net/pecl_http"
install failed

Yet /usr/bin/pecl isn't a directory that exists. Also a sudo pecl install pecl_http returns sudo: pecl: command not found, which I find quite odd.

I'm not entirely sure what's going on here/what I'm doing wrong.

edit: I am using the following repos:

base                         CentOS-6 - Base
epel                         Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux 6 - x86_64
extras                       CentOS-6 - Extras
rpmforge                     RHEL 6 - RPMforge.net - dag
updates                      CentOS-6 - Updates
vz-base                      vz-base
vz-updates                   vz-updates                                                            

Answer 1

Step 1) import the REMI repo

CentOS 5

rpm -Uvh http://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/5/i386/epel-release-5-4.noarch.rpm;
rpm -Uvh http://rpms.famillecollet.com/enterprise/remi-release-5.rpm;

CentOS 6

rpm -Uvh http://download.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/6/i386/epel-release-6-8.noarch.rpm;
rpm -Uvh http://rpms.famillecollet.com/enterprise/remi-release-6.rpm;

Step 2) install php-pear

yum --enablerepo=remi,remi-php55 install php-pear

Step 3) install pecl_http

pecl install pecl_http

Answer 2

If you are using php 5.4.x, IMO best repo to use is iuscommunity. Its very stable and used by Rackspace to do only PHP and a few other packages for CentOS.

rpm -Uhv http://dl.iuscommunity.org/pub/ius/stable/CentOS/6/x86_64/ius-release-1.0-11.ius.centos6.noarch.rpm

yum install php54-pear

Mind you, the reason why its php54-pear and not php-pear is because 5.3 and 5.4 both are compiled in the repository. Here is the list of php packages -> http://dl.iuscommunity.org/pub/ius/stable/CentOS/6/x86_64/repoview/development.languages.group.html

I tested this and it works, but I only use EPEL and iuscommunity REPO's. I avoid using rpmforge myself.