Over at The Constant Media we’ve been working on a project that relies on using PHP to connect to a customers SYBASE database. Essentially they have a proprietary system in place that manages many key aspects of their business and their website, as a key sales channel, needs to interact with it.
If you are pretty confident with linux and don't want to work your way though this there is a command list gist here.
SYBASE is not something we had come across before, and whilst the actual PHP code it’s self isn’t all that tricky to implement, getting SYBASE and it’s dependencies compiled into PHP can be a little fiddly. Below is a step-by-step of how we did this. It’s based around CentOS (our server OS of choice) but should be fairly transferable.
Before I go to far into this i should point out that much of the credit due goes to @andrew_heron, my business partner at The Constant Media, who did much of the hard work and leg work on this project and the initial server builds. I really only got involved when we came to build the production and staging servers and made the server a little more production ready.
The first thing to point out is that to do this you need to compile PHP from the source code and cannot (to my knowledge) do this though yum. We are running this on a CentOS 6 box which was vanilla at the point of install. If you have PHP installed at the moment (though rpm’s or yum) scrub it off before wading in.
Frist, lets update the box and install a few pre-requisites. Because we are compiling from source we are going to need a few dev libraries too (devels). As root or sudo if you prefer:
$ yum install gcc openssl-devel pcre-devel libxml2-devel httpd httpd-devel mod_ssl libcurl-devel libpng-devel $ yum groupinstall "Development Tools"
Installing FreeTDS
SYBASE has a dependency on FreeRDS to so we need to start by downloading, configuring and installing this. All source files are going to be stored in /usr/src throughout.
Note: Some of these version may be out of date when you get to it so you may need to adapt things a little to accommodate this.
Download and unpack FreeTDS:
$ cd /usr/src $ wget ftp://ftp.freetds.org/pub/freetds/stable/freetds-patched.tar.gz $ tar -zxvf freetds-* $ rm -rf freetds-*.tar.gz $ cd freetds-*
Next we configure FreeTDS, specifying the path where we whish to install it. Once configured we can ‘make’ and install the package. Watch for errors at each stage and rectify any that occur before proceeding.
$ ./configure --prefix=/usr/local/freetds $ make $ make install
Installing APR & APR-Util
The next dependencies needed are APR and APR-Util.
APR
$ cd /usr/src $ wget http://apache.mirror.anlx.net/apr/apr-1.5.2.tar.gz $ tar -zxvf apr-* $ rm -rf apr-*.tar.gz $ cd apr-*
Again configure and install, making sure to fix any errors as you go:
$ ./configure $ make $ make install
APR-Util
$ cd /usr/src $ wget http://apache.mirror.anlx.net//apr/apr-util-1.5.4.tar.gz $ tar -zxvf apr-util-1.5.4.tar.gz $ rm -rf apr-util-1.5.4.tar.gz $ cd apr-util-1.5.4/
Configure and install.
$ ./configure --with-apr=/usr/local/apr $ make $ make install
If you have any other dependencies outside the norm then now’s the time to go install them.
Downloading and installing PHP
We’ve chosen to run with PHP 5.6 as we feel it will be secure and stable enough in our environment. If you need an earlier or later version the principles should be the same, just insert it into the wget below.
$ cd /usr/src $ wget http://uk1.php.net/get/php-5.6.8.tar.gz $ mv mirror php-5.6.8.tar.gz $ tar -zxvf php-5.6.8.tar.gz $ rm -rf php-5.6.8.tar.gz $ cd php-5.6.8
The next command is the most important, and most problematic stage of the install. We have chosen some pretty standard includes (php-mysql, php-mysqli, php-mbstring, php-pdo, php-gd and php-curl) but if you need more just add them in.
For the SYSBASE extension to function you need to specify the path to your FreeTDS install. This is the path you specified above in the –prefix flag. As the Apache install is pretty standard we’ve chosen to install this via yum (to keep things simple). For this to work though you need to make sure that httpd-devel is installed (the httpd dev library installed above) and know the path to apxs which comes as part of that library. By standard apxs is located at /usr/sbin/apxs but if by chance it’s not there you should be able to find it with a find ‘find / -name ‘apxs”. If that doesn’t return the path then you probably haven’t installed httpd-devel correctly.
The last peramiter we’ve added is –with-config-file-path. This is where your php.ini file will live – we’ve specified this as /etc/php.ini as it’s a fairly standard and thus makes it easier for others to find.
Once you have adjusted this command to your needs keep a record of it somewhere safe as you will need to re-run it should you ever need to add more modules or upgrade PHP.
$ ./configure --with-sybase_ct=/usr/local/freetds --with-apxs2=/usr/sbin/apxs --with-mysql --with-mysqli --enable-mbstring --with-pdo-mysql --with-openssl --with-curl --with-gd --with-config-file-path=/etc/php.ini
Assuming no errors where returned by the command above you can now make and install PHP:
$ make $ make test $ make install
If you need a template php.ini you can normally find one in/usr/src/php-yourversion/php.ini-development. Failing that just grab one off the web.
PHP should now be installed and working. Running php -v will confirm this for you and you can check the version installed matches your expectations.
Linking PHP & Apache
Lastly, you’ll want to let apache know about your PHP install. To do this just add the following into /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf
# # Enable PHP # AddType application/x-httpd-php .php
It’s also worth adding index.php to the list of accepted index files.
Restart httpd and you should be good to go. Place a phpinfo() file on your server, scan down the list and you should see sybase listed.
$ service httpd start