Apache + php5 problem after 12.04.3 to 14.04.i do release upgrade (server)

Question

I did a 'do-release-upgrade' Most upgrade went fine. But the upgrade from Apache 2.2.22 to 2.4.7 went wrong. There seems to be something wrong with the php5 apache module.

I get the following error message:

apache2: Syntax error on line 203 of /etc/apache2/apache2.conf: Syntax error on line 
1 of /etc/apache2/mods-enabled/php5.load: Cannot load /usr/lib/apache2/module
/libphp5.so into server: /usr/lib/apache2/modules/libphp5.so: cannot open shared   
object file: No such file or directory
Action 'configtest' failed.

How to fix this problem? I'll hope there is easy way to solve this problem. :)

Solution

From the error message, the PHP5 Apache module is not present where it should.

First, check the installation status of the PHP5 module package :

user@hostname:~$ dpkg -l |grep libapache2-mod-php5
ii  libapache2-mod-php5              5.5.9+dfsg-1ubuntu4.3               amd64        server-side, HTML-embedded scripting language (Apache 2 module)

If the result is not like above (a line starting by ii) then the module is not or badly installed.

If dpkg returns no line, do :

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install libapache2-mod-php5

If dpkg returns a line not starting with ii, do :

sudo apt-get purge libapache2-mod-php5
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install libapache2-mod-php5

Comments

[Eliah Kagan]

In your recently deleted "answer" post, I think you mentioned the existing answer here worked. If you consider Benoit's answer to have solved the problem you asked about in this question, I'd recommend you accept that answer by clicking the gray check mark next to (to the left of) it. (More info here about that.)

[Eliah Kagan]

Note sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get --purge --reinstall install libapache2-mod-php5 will do the same thing as the second method (under "If dpkg returns a line not starting with ii"), but will wait to uninstall software until any necessary files for reinstalling it have been downloaded. This may be considered preferable in case of a network interruption (and because it requires, in a sense, fewer steps). It can also replace the first method, as it should succeed nicely even if the package isn't already installed. (So the initial dpkg -l | grep ... step could even be skipped.)