I am developing a php application which my customers will download and install on their own servers. I know the base requirements for my application (like min. php version) but is there a way to generate a list of requirements that needed to run my application on windows or unix systems?
Thanks.
You mean, generate a list of requirements based on an analysis of your source code?
While in theory, that might be possible, I don't think such a solution exists. I think there is no way than analyzing your code by hand, with the PHP manual very close by.
Do you use GD? Then you need PHP with the GD module. Do you need to create GIF images with GD? Then you need GD, but not between versions 1.6 and (I think) 1.8. Do you use PDO? Then you need PHP > 5.1.0. And so on and so on.
In short, I'm afraid think this is going to be a manual process. Manual also as in "PHP manual" - the User Contributed Notes to each function and method are a gem, and any common cross-platform problems are usually noted there somewhere.
While you can trust that PHP x.y.z has a defined set of functions and behaviour, be sure to test well before you declare something suitable to run on a different server. IIS's support of PHP is way better now, I'm told, but the last time a ported a big PHP application over to IIS, it took me three days to work around all the mysterious bugs.
Just be aware of what you are using. For example, you should clearly communicate if you need something like .. a special database binding ( other then mysql ), xml libraries etc.., or even better, create an installer that is bundled with your software that checks that kind of stuff.
Other than that, there should be no problems concerning different servers ( apache / iis / fastcgi.. ). So to answer your question: you have to generate that list all by yourself.
As others have said, you'll need to manually keep track of special libraries and functions you're using. If you need PHP4 compatibility then you won't be able to use the built-in XML libraries for example. You can also check the list of functions added to PHP 5.
One thing I would recommend is installing WampServer if you have access to a Windows machine. Aside from being good for local development, you can download modules for most Apache/PHP/MySQL versions and test combinations.
Related
I've been searching the internet for over 3 days now and cannot find anything that has a clear explanation of how to install ffmpeg for php. I currently have ffmpeg installed correctly on my Mac command line but as to how to use it in my php scripts is beyond me. How do I install ffmpeg for php? Any help would be great. Thanks.
ffmpeg is a set of executable programs and not an API. There was a project I was aware of in the past that built a php extension, but it was not robust and never really emerged as viable for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that ffmpeg has a lot of different options and builds.
Several years ago I was tasked with building an audio and video encoding system for a social network startup, utilizing PHP as the middleware, so I've been through this exact exercise.
One of the most challenging aspects was coming up with a working compiled version of ffmpeg with all the encoders we wanted to have. In our case our hosted environment was AWS and we were using Amazon linux servers, so there were a few hiccups along the way, and patches I had to chase down. There were packages available that had ffmpeg, but they were hopelessly outdated and missing key features we needed. The only way to get things working was to get the ffmpeg source and compile it, along with the source for the various codecs we were using, primarily to get mpeg4 video and compatible audio. If you aren't comfortable doing this, you will probably not be able to get things working.
In regards to the PHP side of it, I ended up using the PHP-FFMpeg library suggested in the comment above, but I did fork it and made a lot of customizations that worked for us, but were not really contributable back upstream. Subsequently, the maintainer of the library has addressed many of the issues I had and it is a much more robust library now that should save you a lot of problems if you were to try and create your own wrapper.
In summary your server needs:
A working compiled version of ffmpeg and its associated helper
programs which may be of need depending on what you're going to be
doing with media you are producing. For example, there is a separate media introspection program (ffprobe) that is used to determine the characteristics of media you want to encode.
A PSR-0/Composer compatible project. Ours was built on top of Symfony 2.x but that isn't a requirement. I did want to mention it as the project has really pushed the improvement and stability of the symfony component that wraps the php 'exec' function at the heart of any effort to call an external program.
Following the instructions and reading through the API you should be able to get a sample encoding to work with PHP, but keep in mind that ffmpeg works with files, and there are lots of file related issues you have to think through (original files, rendered files and naming, temporary file locations) all of which you'll have to deal with unless you're doing something trivial. In our case these programs were async command line/batch oriented and there was a lot of time and effort that needed to go into figuring out a way to scale and be performant. Needless to say, encoding video can take a lot of time, and is not something you want to do in a monolithic php script where the end user uploads and then waits while you do all the processing in the same script!
I know you are trying to do this on your Mac. Is this really the target environment for your production deployment? This is finicky and platform dependent enough of a process that I don't think it's advisable to try and get a hacky version on your Mac, because the process of getting ffmpeg, and the exact version and components is highly variable and extremely important to your success.
I have a PHP class I want to convert to a PHP extension. I checked some tutorials (tuxradar's writing extensions, php.net's extending php, and zend's extension writing) and it's a bit complicated.
I found the article "How to write PHP extensions" (ed note: site is defunct) and I wanted to know if it is possible to use this to make it grab a PHP class from a certain path (say /home/website1/public_html/api/class.php), execute it and return the class instance.
This way it will be usable in other websites that are hosted on the same server – each can simply call the function and it will obtain its own instance.
Is that possible?
The question as I understand it now is, The user has a PHP class that they would like to share with multiple people, but does not want to share the source code.
There are many solutions to this, they generally invovle turning the PHP code into some kind of byte code, and using a PHP extension to run the byte code. I've never used any of these solutions, but I'm aware of the following:
phc is an open source compiler for PHP
Zend Guard
HipHop for PHP - I'm unsure about this, but Facebook recently released it so it might be worth a look.
I'm sure there are others. Just Google for PHP Compiler, or PHP Accelerator.
In one sentence: I don't believe so, I think its a lot more work than that.
No, there is not tool that can do that.
Anyway, what you want call be easily accomplished with auto_prepend_file. Just make that ini directive point to a PHP file that has the class definition, and then it will be available to all the applications.
If you don't want the users to be able to use the source, you can use one the several zend extensions that allow you to pre-compile the file and use it in that form.
You can extend underlying C library functions into PHP space by writing PHP extensions. However, i think in your case you don't need to write one.
I am aware that this is an old question (being from 2012) however the answer has changed and there is now a tool that can do this. Jim Thunderbirds PHP-to-C Extension toolset provides the means to take a simple class in one file all the way up to a complicated multi file multi-level namespaced framework and convert it to a C-extension that can then be installed into your PHP server.
While in many use cases doing so is not needed as the ordinary PHP code will work just as good in some cases significant performance improvements can be experienced. The information page shows that an ordinary class (deliberately designed to take a long time) took 16.802139997482 seconds as plain vanilla PHP, and 3.9628620147705 as a PHP extension built using the tool.
As an added advantage the tool also provides an additional feature. The ability to combine PHP code (to be converted to C) and native C code within the same extension which can produce even greater performance enhancements. The same example used above only tool 0.14397192001343 seconds when much of the intensive code was moved to a bubble sort C code and simply calling it from within the PHP code.
As a side note functionally to the end developers using the code using the extension is very much similar to having the files manually included in the PHP file being developed except it doesn't have to be specifically included as it is done through the PHP extensions component.
(Disclaimer: I am not affiliated with this developer but am glad to have come across it as it is thus far working for converting some of my intensive classes into PHP extensions without needing to know C).
I have developed an app and its written in PHP (with a bunch of SQL scripts), this app will be used by a few small companies. For them to use it, I will have to install Apache and SQL Server for them.
Every method I have thought has fallen short of what I need. I was actually just hoping to use ZendGuard or IonCube but they don't support PHP 5.3.x.
Is there a simpler method where I can maybe store a key in the database and make the app run only when it knows its on that server?
Maybe create a key based on some random numbers/letters and the machine name, sql server host name and encode/decode this when ever the system is in use?
Thanks all for any help or ideas
Even if Zend and Ioncube don't support PHP 5.3 code (which I find hard to believe!! Are you sure?), I'm sure they will in the foreseeable future.
I think it's worth asking them when they are going to introduce support for it.
Update: It indeed seems true: Zend but then, the question is, does your software really need 5.3 (i.e. use 5.3 specific features like namespaces and such?)
I have a LAMP (Linux/Apache/MySQL/Php) application that I should release soon.
Even if I've never used it, I'm thinking about using autotools for it, to make the configuration and installation process easier (for the customer and for me, in the future).
Have you ever done (or thought) such a thing? Are there any drawbacks? Does it make a bit of sense?
Autotools is used mostly when you are trying to compile your programs for multiple target platforms. This applies for C code in general and checks stuff like available libs, size of data types, libc functions etc. So unless your program is written in C and you have a need for supporting all kinds of Unix flavors, dont bother with autotools.
If you are trying to build some kind of installation program for Linux, I suggest you look into rpmbuild (for redhat distros). Rpmbuild is easy to use if all you are doing is packaging files for easier distribution. A good tutorial is available here. One great aspect of rpmbuild is that you can specify requirements on the target system, for example: apache, mysql and even specific php-modules that you need.
For configuration and deployment, you can have a look at ant.
In my previous employment, we were using ant for deployment/configuration of a mix of perl, php, xml, xsl, unit test , Apache config ...
You have a build.properties file where you can put some default values and the customer will jsut have to create a local.properties where its values will overwrite the one from build.properties.
Also if you need to launch some scripts that are parts of the setup, you can also do that with ant.
simple idea
I may be stating obvious, but wouldn't it be easier for the sake of it, just to use
phpinfo();
?
From it you may mostly read everything - server version, PHP version, MySQL version and running PHP extension, compare it against what you need and advice to your client or their hoster that "I need this and that installed".
When building some of my PHP apps, a lot of the functionality could be coded using PEAR/PECL modules, however, the fact that some people using it may not have the access to install things, It poses a puzzler for me.
Should I forsake some users to use PEAR/PECL for functionality, where these will allow me to have a system coded up quicker than if I wrote my own functionality, but eans that it will exclude certain people from using it.
It partly depends on how much time you have, and the purpose of the project. If you're just trying to make something that works, go with PEAR/PECL. If you're trying to learn to be a better programmer, and you have the time, then I'd recommend taking the effort to write your own versions. Once you understand the innards of whatever you're trying to replace, you may want to switch to the PEAR/PECL version so that you're not wasting time reimplementing what has already been implemented...
...but on the other hand, preexisting tools don't always do exactly what you need, and sometimes have overhead that doesn't do you any good. This is why Unix command-line tools are so small and narrow of purpose; nobody really needs a version of 'ls' that can do anything besides what 'ls' can currently do. Your version of whatever PEAR library will, by virtue of being written by you, do exactly what you need doing. It requires some careful thought...
...but on the gripping hand, don't spend too much time thinking about it. Spend five minutes, make a decision, and start coding. Even if you make the wrong decision, you'll at least have gotten more practice coding. :-)
Save on development time by developing with the pear libraries, and provide the libraries bundled in what you distribute (though you'll have to make sure it obeys licensing requirements)
I would not depend on certain PECL extensions being installed unless you're doing something particularly related to one (say an XDebug web-frontend or something), the majority of installs will be carrying a fairly vanilla set of extensions.
My suggestion is to start with assuming PEAR/PECL modules, and get the rest of the code done. Then, once you've got most of your code working the way you want, you can evaluate going back and piece by piece replacing the outside code with your own. Plus, by then you'll have a better idea of the impact using those has on your userbase.
Code it initially using PEAR/PECL and if you get people asking for a non PEAR/PECL version, start coding your own alternatives then for such a version.
The initial development will go much faster with this, and you may find that no-one cares about requiring 3rd party libraries once you have started releasing apps.
Use PEAR but allow for including the PEAR packages inside your project. All PEAR packages can be separately downloaded from http://pear.php.net/ and can be put anywhere. Depending on convenience and licensing issues you could then package all the required PEAR files with your project or tell users how to download and "install" them.
What I do most times is I'll never use PEAR installed globally on a server. Versions can change and affect your application.. Instead I have a config file (in my case XML) that lists all the packages required and their versions. The installer connects to my personal FTP repository and downloads and installs all the PEAR packages locally in $PROJECTBASE/lib/pear/ .. And PEAR is run locally instead of globally. Something you may want to consider.
Using PEAR is no problem, if users do not have root access to their webserver, they can simply download the PHP files from pear.php.net and add it to their include path. PECL's a little more tricky to work around, since there's often no way to install new modules without root access.
You need to watch out because a lot of modules in pear are really of pretty low quality.
Some are great, don't get me wrong, but don't assume that anything in pear, by virtue of being in pear, is at any given quality. Which means you need to at least skim the source of a pear module before deciding to use it, which for simple enough tasks may take more time than going without pear.
pecl is different, however. Extensions tend to be better vetted and tested, else they'd crash php.
Reiterating much of what's already been said: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001145.html