title: How to install MySQLi on a cPanel-managed server?
body: <p>I have an existing web application that was written over the past few years. I chose mysqli as the method for accessing a MySQL database. That works fine. My problem is that I'm deploying to a 3rd party web host server - WHM/cPanel - and I cannot find a way to get mysqli installed on this server. I've tried too many things to list here - including everything I could find on this site. 
  This server uses yum. It has PHP5.4 - MySQL 5.5 When I run phpinfo on it there is a MySQL section but no MySQLi section. My code crashes with "class mysqli not found" error. 
  The documentation on PHP.net states that mysqli was included in the standard distribution starting with PHP 5.0. I know for a fact that is no longer true - the last 3 machines i've built with Ubuntu did not have mysqli on them I had to find/install it using apt-get install php5-mysqlnd I cannot find a package for mysqli on this server. 
  Rewriting all my SQL to use the native driver will not be a simple task. i'd prefer to avoid that. Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.</p>