Recently I saw some weirdness in an existing application when I upgraded a PECL module that the application depended on. To figure out if that really was the problem, I wanted to downgrade the module to its previous version. There is no opposite command to “upgrade” but you can instruct pecl to install a specific version of a module, using the -f switch to force pecl to overwrite newer modules.

Downgrading Pecl_OAuth

For me the problems were caused in the switch between default functionality in pecl_oauth 1.1.0 (this isn’t a bug, but is correct behaviour according to the OAuth 1 spec, I just had code that expected the old functionality), so I wanted to put my version back to 1.0.0

pecl install -f oauth-1.0.0

It was easy once I stopped looking for an option called “downgrade” or something like that :) In fact you can use this trick to install all kinds of pecl versions, simply refer to the package as [package name]-[version]. By default pecl won’t let you install packages that aren’t marked “stable”, but you can install beta packages by putting “beta” in place of [version].

Hopefully now I’ve written this I’ll remember next time how to do it!