Thoughts Electrique

I once had to install a custom PHP extension on a 1&1 managed server. In this case the company had already purchased a managed server which was running the corporate website. They wanted to install an extranet-like webapplication which needed the ImageMagick PHP extension. In the following post I will outlike how I compiled and installed this extension on the managed server without having administrative access.

Preparation

To make the approach more modular we will use an environment variable pointing to our htdocs directory. I will call this variable $HTDOCS.

export HTDOCS=/kunden/homepages/.../htdocs

We can check if everything is correct by changing into the htdocs directory.

cd $HTDOCS

We will now create two directories:

• $HTDOCS/linux-src: To hold all the data we need to compile the extensionn
• $HTDOCS/linux: To hold all the compiled data

This setup allows us to delete the linux-src directory after we finished compiling the extension and save some diskspace.

mkdir -p $HTDOCS/linux-src
mkdir -p $HTDOCS/linux

Now we will download the required sourcecode into our working directory:

mkdir -p $HTDOCS/linux-src/download
cd $HTDOCS/linux-src/download
wget ftp://ftp.imagemagick.org/pub/ImageMagick/ImageMagick.tar.gz
wget http://pecl.php.net/get/imagick-2.3.0.tgz
wget ftp://ftp.remotesensing.org/pub/libtiff/tiff-3.8.2.tar.gz
wget http://us3.php.net/get/php-5.2.10.tar.gz/from/us.php.net/mirror

Note: The URLs to the latest versions may change over time. You will have to adjust them and also watch for changed file names in the following steps. Also be sure to use the PHP version currently active on your managed server.

Extracting the sourcecode

Now create a folder for the extracted sourcecode and extract the source archives:

mkdir -p $HTDOCS/linux-src/extracted/imagick
mkdir -p $HTDOCS/linux-src/extracted/php-imagick
mkdir -p $HTDOCS/linux-src/extracted/libtiff
mkdir -p $HTDOCS/linux-src/extracted/php5

cd $HTDOCS/linux-src/extracted/imagick && tar xfz $HTDOCS/linux-src/download/ImageMagick.tar.gz
cd $HTDOCS/linux-src/extracted/php-imagick && tar xfz $HTDOCS/linux-src/download/imagick-2.3.0.tgz
cd $HTDOCS/linux-src/extracted/libtiff && tar xfz $HTDOCS/linux-src/download/tiff-3.8.2.tar.gz
cd $HTDOCS/linux-src/extracted/php5 && tar xfz $HTDOCS/linux-src/download/php-5.2.10.tar.gz

Building delegate libraries

ImageMagick uses different delegate libraries for certain formats. We have to build these first so they can be incorporated into our ImageMagick build. In this case we will only use libtiff to allow the usage of the TIFF image format.

Building libtiff from source

Building libtiff is pretty straightforward. Simply use the following commands inside the extracted source archive:

./configure --prefix=$HTDOCS/linux/
make
make install

Building ImageMagick from source

Change into the extracted source directory and type in the following:

./configure --without-perl --prefix=$HTDOCS/linux \
  CPPFLAGS="-I$HTDOCS/linux/include" LDFLAGS="-L$HTDOCS/linux/lib/"
make
make install

You can type the following command to test the compiled ImageMagick.

make check

After ImageMagick is built we can now go on and create the PHP extension.

Building the ImageMagick PHP extenstion

To compile the extension we have to have a PHP development environment in place. To create one we’ll simply compile and install PHP (this sounds more scary than it is).

Building PHP from source

Change into the extracted PHP archive and type in the following:

./configure --prefix=$HTDOCS/linux
make
make test
make install

The make test target will run the PHP test suite. You can expect some tests to fail but if the number of failing tests is overwhelming you should get suspicious.

Building the ImageMagick PECL extension

Change into the extracted source archive and type in the following:

phpize --clean
phpize
./configure --prefix=$HTDOCS/linux --with-php-config=/usr/bin/php-config5 --with-imagick=$HTDOCS/linux

The configure script should go through. Unfortunately it seems that the prefix and paths will not be set correctly in the Makefile. We will have to adjust this and replace the /usr/local paths with the path to our $HTDOCS/linux

echo "$HTDOCS/linux" | sed -e 's/\//\\\//g' > htdocs_pattern && \
  export HTDOCS_PATTERN=`cat htdocs_pattern` && rm htdocs_pattern
perl -pi -e "s/\/usr\/local/$HTDOCS_PATTERN/g" Makefile

Note: The above command looks a bit freaky and is a bit of a quick hack. What it basically does it is escaping the slashes (/) in the $HTDOCS path and writing this to a file. Then exporting the content of the file to an environment variable and deleting the file. After this PERL is used to replace all /usr/local paths in the Makefile to $HTDOCS/linux

After that we are good to go and can build the extension:

./configure --prefix=$HTDOCS/linux
make
make install

Now the extension should be build successfully and is placed in the directory $HTDOCS/linux/somepath (the make install will tell you the extact path) . The last thing we have to do is activating the extension.

Activating the extension

To activate the extension for a certain folder, create a file named php.ini (for example in the $HTDOCS directory) with the following content inside the folder:

extension_dir=$HTDOCS/linux/somepath
extension=imagick.so

Also don’t forget to activate PHP 5 with using a .htaccess file:

AddType x-mapp-php5 .php
AddHandler x-mapp-php5 .php

That’s all. If you have any questions feel free to comment. I hope this helps some of you.

Tags: 1und1, Administration, ImageMagick, Linux, PECL, PHP, Tutorial

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 26th, 2009 at 4:42 am and is filed under Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.