Install php-devel (or how to get pear working) on RHEL

I lost all morning trying to get this working, so I thought I'd post it here. I hope it saves someone else's morning some time.

Whenever you require a pear package on Red Hat EL, you can install php-pear to issue both pecl and pear commands. However, php-devel isn't listed as a dependency of the php-pear package, so you end up getting the 'phpize: command not found' error whenever you try to install something.

So I set out to investigate how to get phpize working and for the looks of it, you need to have the rhn optional channel enabled in order to be able to yum install it.

I tried registering the channels, but since I'm on physical hosting, I don't have it. I sent a ticket but you know how long that can take some times and I really needed this working soon.

So based on a stackoverflow question found here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/12280872/installing-php-devel-on-rhel6-php-5-3-3

I did the following to get it working:

-> As root, enter 'rpm -q php'

-> Note the version of the installed package

-> Go on http://rpm.pbone.net/

-> Search for php-devel

-> Find the php-devel package that matches your installed php rpm (the one you found above)

-> Copy a mirror link and wget it on your machine

-> enter 'rpm -Uvh pathtodownloaded_rpm'

And that's it :) Hope it helps!