I recently ran in to a situation where I was building PHP 7.1.13 from source. Configuration & make went fine, however, when I ran make install it hung. It turns out that if you are building PHP with Apache (apxs) the make file calls apxs with the -a flag which tells it to modify the httpd.conf file. If, for whatever reason, the file is not writeable then it fails and you get the hang.
Line 108 in my Makefile looks like this:
INSTALL_IT = $(mkinstalldirs) '$(INSTALL_ROOT)/usr/lib64/httpd/modules' && $(mkinstalldirs) '$(INSTALL_ROOT)/etc/httpd/conf' && /usr/sbin/apxs -S LIBEXECDIR='$(INSTALL_ROOT)/usr/lib64/httpd/modules' -S SYSCONFDIR='$(INSTALL_ROOT)/etc/httpd/conf' -i -a -n php7 libphp7.la
I had to remove the -a flag and then it was fine.
Installation on Unix systems
Table of Contents
- Apache 1.3.x on Unix systems
- Apache 2.x on Unix systems
- Nginx 1.4.x on Unix systems
- Lighttpd 1.4 on Unix systems
- Sun, iPlanet and Netscape servers on Sun Solaris
- LiteSpeed Web Server/OpenLiteSpeed Web Server on Unix systems
- CGI and command line setups
- HP-UX specific installation notes
- OpenBSD installation notes
- Solaris specific installation tips
- Debian GNU/Linux installation notes
This section will guide you through the general configuration and installation of PHP on Unix systems. Be sure to investigate any sections specific to your platform or web server before you begin the process.
As our manual outlines in the General Installation Considerations section, we are mainly dealing with web centric setups of PHP in this section, although we will cover setting up PHP for command line usage as well.
There are several ways to install PHP for the Unix platform, either with a compile and configure process, or through various pre-packaged methods. This documentation is mainly focused around the process of compiling and configuring PHP. Many Unix like systems have some sort of package installation system. This can assist in setting up a standard configuration, but if you need to have a different set of features (such as a secure server, or a different database driver), you may need to build PHP and/or your web server. If you are unfamiliar with building and compiling your own software, it is worth checking to see whether somebody has already built a packaged version of PHP with the features you need.
Prerequisite knowledge and software for compiling:
- Basic Unix skills (being able to operate "make" and a C compiler)
- An ANSI C compiler
- A web server
- Any module specific components (such as GD, PDF libs, etc.)
When building directly from Git sources or after custom modifications you might also need:
- autoconf: 2.13+ (for PHP < 5.4.0), 2.59+ (for PHP >= 5.4.0), 2.64+ (for PHP >= 7.2.0)
- automake: 1.4+
- libtool: 1.4.x+ (except 1.4.2)
- re2c: Version 0.13.4 or newer
- flex: Version 2.5.4 (for PHP <= 5.2)
-
bison:
- PHP 5.4: 1.28, 1.35, 1.75, 1.875, 2.0, 2.1, 2.2, 2.3, 2.4, 2.4.1, 2.4.2, 2.4.3, 2.5, 2.5.1, 2.6, 2.6.1, 2.6.2, 2.6.4
- PHP 5.5: 2.4, 2.4.1, 2.4.2, 2.4.3, 2.5, 2.5.1, 2.6, 2.6.1, 2.6.2, 2.6.3, 2.6.4, 2.6.5, 2.7
- PHP 5.6: >= 2.4, < 3.0
- PHP 7.0 - 7.3: 2.4 or later (including Bison 3.x)
- PHP 7.4: > 3.0
The initial PHP setup and configuration process is controlled by the use of the command line options of the configure script. You could get a list of all available options along with short explanations running ./configure --help. Our manual documents the different options separately. You will find the core options in the appendix, while the different extension specific options are descibed on the reference pages.
When PHP is configured, you are ready to build the module and/or executables. The command make should take care of this. If it fails and you can't figure out why, see the Problems section.
Note:
Some Unix systems (such as OpenBSD and SELinux) may disallow mapping pages both writable and executable for security reasons, what is called PaX MPROTECT or W^X violation protection. This kind of memory mapping is, however, necessary for PCRE's JIT support, so either PHP has to be built without PCRE's JIT support, or the binary has to be whitelisted by any means provided by the system.
Note: Cross-compiling for ARM with the Android toolchain is currently not supported.
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User Contributed Notes 5 notes
cj3 at clifjackson dot net ¶
1 year ago
doug at NOSPAM dot techie dot net ¶
16 years ago
Users compiling under some versions of Solaris/SunOS may encounter the following error.
symbol ap_block_alarms: referenced symbol not found
To address this problem, add the following additional flag to the Apache build configure line:
--enable-rule=SHARED_CORE
So, adding this to the original instructions, you'd configure your Apache build like so:
./configure --prefix=/www --enable-module=so --enable-rule=SHARED_CORE
Doug
Arjan van Bentem ¶
13 years ago
When using Red Hat Fedora, beware of Security Enhanced Linux, SELinux.
Quoted from Red Hat: "The security goal is to make sure that Apache HTTP is only reading the static Web content, and not doing anything else such as writing to the content, connecting to database sockets, reading user home directories, etc."
These limitations include, among many other things, using mkdir to create directories, using fopen to access files, using fopen or get_headers to read URLs, or using exec to run external applications that happen to use sockets (or maybe access some files, but which will run fine when executed from the command line as Unix user apache or httpd -- such as HylaFAX "faxstat" as invoked from nweb2fax recvq.php and sendq.php).
See /var/log/messages for any denials due to the SELinux policy. To disable it:
- System, Administration, Security Level and Firewall
- open the SELinux tab
- click the Transition tree
- check Disable SELinux protection for Apache HTTP
- execute /etc/init.d/httpd restart
See also http://fedora.redhat.com/docs/selinux-faq/ and http://php.net/results.php?q=selinux&p=wholesite
Alex at GrimMusic dot com ¶
12 years ago
I am new to linux/apache/php (coming from server 2003/IIS/Asp.Net), so i was stumped as to why php/apache could only use static content. Also, it couldn't access some documents that you created somewhere else, and then dragged into the HTML directory.
After some research, i found the problem was the SELinux context of the files. It took me forever to find the Proper command to use to change that, as all the examples on the net were out dated using old commands:
# chcon "user_u:object_r:httpd_sys_content_t" /var/www/html -Rc
This will change the SELinux context of all the documents under the /var/www/html directory (which is the web directory under Fedora), to allow the httpd process to access them, and the '-Rc' flag will make the changes Recursive, and will output it's progress for each file that it sucessfully changes.
thansen at terra dot com dot br ¶
15 years ago
The configure directives --with-apxs2 and --with-apxs2filter are not compatible one with other, even though the configure script will not complain about that. Each one affect the way Apache will call the php parser: If you choose the first one, you must use the traditional include:
AddType application/x-httpd-php php
at httpd.conf, to call the parser. If you use the --with-apxs2filter, the include will be:
<Files *.php>
SetOutputFilter PHP
SetInputFilter PHP
</Files>
, and php will be called as a filter to .php files.
If you use both together, you will get compilation errors (duplicate symbols while linking libphp4).
