I ran into major dependency issues trying to follow this tutorial provided in the Media Temple knowledge-base. Normally it is recommended to install suPHP by compiling it from source (as mentioned in the tutorial), but mainly because of the mode that suPHP is put into during the installation. The reckoning for suPHP is well-put here, with the three modes of operation being:

• owner: Run scripts with owner UID/GID
• force: Run scripts with UID/GID specified in Apache configuration
• paranoid: Run scripts with owner UID/GID but also check if they match the UID/GID specified in the Apache configuration

The advantage of compiling from source is that suPHP can run in paranoid mode—however, as the previous link states: Although suPHP states that the default mode is “paranoid”, the libapache2-mod-suphp is installed in “owner” mode by default. When suPHP is installed in “owner” mode, the directive suPHP_UserGroup is not recognized which is required for “force” or “paranoid” mode.

Running suPHP in owner mode doesn’t seem all-that-bad, considering it is in fact the default for some installations. However, the comment about not having access to the “suPHP_UserGroup” within your configuration file is true, and if you try to restart Apache with it in there (as the Media Temple tutorial suggests), it will result in an error, and possibly crash your server.

My workaround is to remove any of the lines that include “suPHP_UserGroup”, and simply use yum to install suPHP, which lets you skip steps 1-4 in the tutorial.

yum install mod_suphp