IonCube Loaders is basically an encryption/decryption utility for PHP applications which also assists in speeding up the pages that are served. It is often required for a lot of PHP-based applications.
This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo’ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you through the step by step installation Vesta Control Panel on a Ubuntu 16.04 (Xenial Xerus) server.
Install IonCube Loader on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS
Step 1. First make sure that all your system packages are up-to-date by running these following apt-get commands in the terminal.
sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get upgrade
Step 2. Install LAMP server.
A Ubuntu 16.04 LAMP server is required. If you do not have LAMP installed, you can follow our guide here.
Step 3. Installing IonCube Loaders.
Download and extract the latest stable version ioncube, We will use the wget command to get the ionCube file from their website with the following command:
### 64-Bit version ### wget http://downloads3.ioncube.com/loader_downloads/ioncube_loaders_lin_x86-64.tar.gz tar xfz ioncube_loaders_lin_x86-64.tar.gz ### 32-Bit version ### wget http://downloads3.ioncube.com/loader_downloads/ioncube_loaders_lin_x86.tar.gz tar xfz ioncube_loaders_lin_x86.tar.gz
Next we need to locate where PHP is loading extensions, this can be done by running the below command and looking:
php -i | grep php.ini
You will see an output that looks something like the following:
extension_dir => /usr/lib/php/20151012 => /usr/lib/php/20151012
Open the extracted ioncube folder and copy the ioncube loader file match to your php version:
cd ioncube cp ioncube_loader_lin_7.0.so /usr/lib/php/20151012
Once the file has been copied to the extensions directory, we need to make sure that the PHP configuration file is updated to use the correct extension:
nano /etc/php.ini
At the very top of the file let’s add the following line:
zend_extension = "/usr/lib/php/20151012/ioncube_loader_lin_7.0.so"
Now, we can restart Apache web server and PHP so that the changes take place:
systemctl restart apache2.service systemctl restart php7.0-fpm.service
Step 4. Testing ionCube on Ubuntu 16.04.
If you can see the version of PHP with ionCube loader version, meaning you have successfully installed and configured ioncube PHP loader in your Ubuntu 16.04 system.
php -v
Results:
PHP 7.0.15-0ubuntu0.16.04.6 (cli) ( NTS ) Copyright (c) 1997-2017 The PHP Group Zend Engine v3.0.0, Copyright (c) 1998-2017 Zend Technologies <strong>with the ionCube PHP Loader (enabled)</strong> + Intrusion Protection from ioncube24.com (unconfigured) v6.0.8, Copyright (c) 2002-2015, by ionCube Ltd.
Congratulation’s! You have successfully installed IonCube Loader. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing IonCube Loader in Ubuntu 16.04 Xenial Xerus system. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you to check the official IonCube web site.