How to install PHP-CPP

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 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.

Limitations

At this moment, PHP-CPP only supports single-threaded PHP installations. Web servers come in a number forms: there are the ones that handle each page request in different process, and the ones that handle each page request in the same process, but in a different thread. If you're using such a multi-threaded PHP installation, you can not use the PHP-CPP library. Most installations are single-threaded however, so this should not be a show stopper.

Are you not sure whether you have a single-threaded or multi-threaded PHP environment? Just try to compile the PHP-CPP library, if you see a zillion errors, you can be pretty sure that this is because of your installation is multi-threaded.

The reason why we've chosen not to support multi-threaded PHP installations lies in the fact that internally the Zend engine uses a very odd system to ensure thread safety. Essentially, they pass an additional parameter to each and every function call that holds a pointer-to-a-pointer with thread information that you can access with specific C macro's, and that you have to pass on to every other function call that you make. This makes life for extension writers much harder than is necessary - and is in total conflict with the core principle of the PHP-CPP library: to make life easy.

However, if there is demand for, we will add support for multi-threaded PHP installations, and hopefully we can even keep the same simple C++ API as we have now.

Download

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.git

After 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.

make

The PHP-CPP library has now been built, and 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 install

Congratulations! 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.