I just recently switched a bunch of sites over to Media Temple, and was dismayed to see that by default the sites run PHP4. Since many of my projects require PHP5 I set out to figure out how to get these sites running. A fair amount of digging through the Media Temple knowlege-base revealed the answer.
- Create a .htaccess file in the root of the site
- Add the following snippet of code and save:
Action php5-script /gs-bin/php-5.1.6-6 AddHandler php5-script .php
Update: MediaTemple GS is now running PHP 5.2.6. To enable it, use this snippet instead:
Action php5-script /gs-bin/php-5.2.6-1
AddHandler php5-script .php

11 Comments to “PHP5 on Media Temple Grid-Server”
Mate – worked a treat, thank you!
Great tip, this helped a lot.
Well adding just
AddHandler php5-script .php
in .htaccess helped. Thanks for the tip though.
Thanks for the tip… I was concerned about tying this to a specific version of php, because it might break when they upgrade their version.
Doing more hunting on their pages, I found the following way of doing this in a non version dependent way:
> AddHandler php5-script .php
(in your .htaccess file).
Again, thanks, your tip got me started in the right direction.
Hey Morgan, totally valid concern, but FYI, they do seem to leave backwards compatibility, because I didn’t catch the last upgrade for a few months and everything continued to work fine. Good to know it can be less specific though.
Wonderful! This is exactly what I’m looking for and it works like a charm! Thank you.
Super helpful — a painless way to upgrade to php 5.2.6 on mediatemple servers!
really need this. thanks!
It worked so great, thank you for you post ^_^
Thanks for sharing! Exactly what I was looking for. Site worked as soon as I added this to the .htaccess file.