Before you can build your own super fast native PHP extension using the PHP-CPP library, you will first have to install the PHP-CPP library on your system(s).
Luckily, for most of us (those who use Linux or Apple environments), this will be a piece of cake. If you're on a different platform however, you are left on your own, because we (as in me, the PHP-CPP developer), only uses Linux systems. There is however no reason why this library should not also work on other platforms, because it only uses straight forward C++ code. Thus, if you are on a different platform and have managed to compile the library on it, please give us feedback so that we can update these installation instructions and include other platforms as well.
Installation begins with downloading the source code. You can either download the latest release from our download page, or get the latest bleeding edge work-in-progress version from GitHub.
To get the latest GitHub version, run the following command from the command line:
git clone https://github.com/CopernicaMarketingSoftware/PHP-CPP.gitAfter you've downloaded the software (either from our website, or directly from GitHub), change your working directory to the PHP-CPP directory, and open the file named "Makefile" with your editor of choice.
The Makefile is a file that holds settings and instructions for the compiler. In 96 out of 100 situations, the default settings in this Makefile will already be perfect for you, but you may want to have a look at it and make (small) changes to it. You can for example change the installation directory, and the compiler that is going to be used.
After you've checked that all settings in the Makefile are correct, you can build the software. Do this by running the following command from within the PHP-CPP directory.
makeThis will start the compiler and build the library.
After you ran 'make', and the PHP-CPP library was built, all that is left to do is install it on your system. You can use the "make install" command for it. This command should be executed as root, either by using "sudo", or by logging on as root first.
sudo make installWe've heard reports from some users that when they try to run their first extension, an error is reported that the "libphpcpp.so" can not be located on their system. To fix this, you should update the shared library cache on your system. This can be done with the "ldconfig" command.
sudo make installThat was it! After these steps you are now the happy owner of a system with PHP-CPP installed and nothing can stop you from building your first fast native PHP extension.
If you try to compile the software on OSX, you may run into linking and "unresolved symbol" errors. In that case you should make a change to the Makefile. Somewhere in the Makefile there is an option "LINKER_FLAGS". This option should be modified, the flag "-undefined dynamic_lookup" should be added to it.