Amazon web services phpmyadmin: The mbstring extension is missing

Question

I have installed phpMyAdmin on the hand of this tutorial: https://gist.github.com/suvozit/8998731 and connected my RDS instance as host in the /var/www/html/phpmyadmin/config.inc.php file.

Now I got the following error when I visit example.com/phpmyadmin/index.php:

The mbstring extension is missing. Please check your PHP configuration.

So I searched the internet for this error and people came with the following solution, which I tried:

Install the php-mbstring extension:

yum install php-mbstring 

When I enter this command the proces starts but gives the following lines back:

-> Processing Conflict: php55-common-5.5.24-1.100.amzn1.x86_64 php-common <5.5.24-1.100.amzn1 conflict
-> Processing Conflict: php55-mbstring-5.5.24-1.100.amzn1.x86_64 php-mbstring <5.5.24-1.100.amzn1 conflict
-> Processing Conflict: php56-common-5.6.8-1.111.amzn1.x86_64 php-common <5.5.22-1.98 conflict

-> Ready to resolve dependencies
Error: php55-mbstring conflicts with php-mbstring 5.3.29-1.8.amzn1.x86_64
Error: php56-common conflicts with php-common-5.3.29-1.8.amzn1.x86_64
Error: php55-common conflicts with php-common-5.3.29-1.8.amzn1.x86_64
  You could try using --skip-broken to work around the problem
  You could try: rpm -Va --nofiles --nodigest

$ php -v returns:

PHP 5.6.8 (cli) (built: Apr 17 2015 18:04:37) 
Copyright (c) 1997-2015 The PHP Group
Zend Engine v2.6.0, Copyright (c) 1998-2015 Zend Technologies

Answer 1

You need to install the PHP 5.6 version as superuser.

sudo yum install php56-mbstring

Answer 2

The issue was with the package conflict. So when installing php-gd you need to specify the version. I fixed it by running: sudo yum install php55-gd