Category: Technology

Warning! Techy post – if your not into Web development you’ll want to skip this one…

I’ve been wanting to try out Zend Core (Zend’s standard PHP stack / extension or “Reliable PHP made easy”) for a while but as Ubuntu isn’t officially supported I’ve held off. A problem with some code running on the Ubuntu version of PHP 5 forced my hand – I discovered that its actually not that hard to get ZC up and running on Ubuntu. Thought I’d share in case this is helpful to anyone…

1. Download, unpack and run the ./install command as per usual
2. I opted to stick with the version of Apache already installed (as its slightly newer than the Zend bundled one)
3. My experience of Zend attempting to configure Apache varied – one some boxes it almost worked, others it didn’t. If you find the installer crashing out just untick the configure Apache option and try again.
4. Once Zend Core has completed you’ll need to tweak things abit…

PHP5 Module

The ZC installer will have probably left your Apache configured with 2 LoadModule php5_module entries (one in /etc/apache2/apache2.conf – thanks to ZC and the other Ubuntu one in /etc/apache2/mods-enabled/php5.load). So you can either do a sudo a2dismod php5 to remove the Ubuntu one or modify the Ubuntu one to the following:

LoadModule php5_module /usr/local/Zend/Core/modules/apache22/libphp5.so

In fact you can be cunning here by commenting out the Ubuntu PHP5 extension and adding the ZC one in this file – allowing you to effectively switch between the 2 different extensions should you need to.

MySQL extension – if you’re using MySQL then you’ll need to watch out for the fact that the bundled MySQL extensions look for the MySQL socket file in /tmp/mysql.sock rather than the Debian / Ubuntu location which is /var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock

In most cases changing in php.ini:

mysql.default_socket =
to
mysql.default_socket = /var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock

Does the trick; but alas not in all cases it seems (eg MySQL PDO). Really hacky fix to this (please do let me know if you have something better – other than editing the socket in the /etc/my.cnf file) is to run a scheduled (using crontab) symlink of /var/run/mysqld/mysql.sock to /tmp/mysql.sock

To do this run: sudo crontab -e
and add the following line:

 5 * * * * ln -s /var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock /tmp/mysql.sock

And for now that works for me. If you want a copy of some of the relevant config files / snippets (including the extra bit that ZC adds to the apache2.conf) then I have zipped them up for ease.

Zend Core itself looks like a good product – being able to access to php.ini options via web based tool is pretty useful, as is knowing you are working on a consistent & tested version of PHP. Its a shame MySQL doesn’t offer a similar free / unsupported version of their MySQL Enterprise in a similar way really…