Learning PHP - Part 1 - Lets Compile PHP!

Purpose

To document my trials & tribulations with learning PHP through laracasts. This is the article will cover the 1st step from Laracasts.

Part 1

Laracasts main site
Laracasts - PHP for beginners

Chapters

Chapter 1 - Installing PHP

Installing PHP

Originally, I installed PHP the usual way.

sudo apt install -y php
php -v
# PHP php-7.2.x ...

Okay sweet its installed…hmmm I wonder if anyone else uses an environment manager like I do Ruby.

So with very little effort I found phpenv ! Aha! Awesome good stuff.
The documentation linked to an easier to use phpenv-installer . Ok cool. I have a ton of packages from when I compiled Ruby. Piece of cake. I have my handy dandy vps-cli gem packages I’m good to go! Okay, here we go:

curl -L https://raw.githubusercontent.com/phpenv/phpenv-installer/master/bin/phpenv-installer \
    | bash
# phpenv does its thing. Tells me to add it to my .zshrc.
# Being the compliant monkey I am, I do it.

phpenv install "7.3.8"
# configure: error reinstall BZip2

Yea sure, no problem whatever, I’ll google, find the package easy peezy.

I was dead wrong. I struggled with multiple compilation errors for about ~1hour. About 10 compilation errors later and adding multiple packages to my VpsCli gem, (Which I really need to fix. I plan to, but different problem for a different day), I was finally able to compile using phpenv.

After a lot of blood sweat and tears, I finally managed to compile php.
Here are all the .deb packages I used on Ubuntu 18.10

module VpsCli
  class Packages
    # ...above code omitted for brevity
    LIBS = %w[libssl-dev libcurl4-openssl-dev libxml2-dev
              re2c libbz2-dev libjpeg-turbo8-dev libpng-dev
              libzip-dev libtidy-dev libxslt-dev automake libtool autoconf
              flex bison libkrb5-dev libonig-dev].freeze
    # ...below code omitted for brevity
  end
end

{“ “} In ruby land heres how I would handle it with a quick pry session:{“ “}
```bash gem install vps_cli gem install pry

pry

require ‘vps_cli’ require ‘rake’ pkgs = VpsCliPackagesLIBS.join(‘ ‘) Rake.sh(“sudo apt install -y #{pkgs}”) exit

phpenv install “7.3.8” # SUCCESS! phpenv global “7.3.8” php -v

PHP 7.3.8 …

Link to VpsCli repository - lib/vps_cli/packages.rb

Yes, I know the codebase needs some TLC to get it to where I want it to be. I wrote it ~6-8months ago. Maybe I’ll rewrite it in PHP?! Who knows! But continue on this Laracasts PHP journey with me!

What I learned

Maybe next time I should stick to a simple sudo apt install -y php…
BUT! On the off chance I need a different PHP version I’m all set! Now, let’s start building!

Links

Follow along with my repo

Laracasts main site
PHP for beginners
PHPENV github
PHPENV-INSTALLER - github