How To Install Zend Guard Loader on Ubuntu 14.04

In this tutorial, we will show you how to install the Zend Guard Loader on Ubuntu 14.04. For those of you who didn’t know, Zend Guard Loader is a free runtime application that enables PHP to run the scripts encoded by Zend Guard. The Guard Loader extension must be installed on each Web server that runs files that were encoded with, or use, Zend Guard licenses. The Zend Guard Loader translates encoded files to a format that can be parsed by the Zend Engine. This runtime process uses the Zend engine as a trigger to start the Zend Guard Loader component. At the time of writing this article, Zend Guard Loader supports PHP 5.5 or higher.

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. I will show you the step-by-step installation Zend guard loader (Zend Optimizer) on Ubuntu 14.04.

Prerequisites

• A server running one of the following operating systems: Ubuntu 14.04, and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint.
• It’s recommended that you use a fresh OS install to prevent any potential issues.
• SSH access to the server (or just open Terminal if you’re on a desktop).
• A non-root sudo user or access to the root user. We recommend acting as a non-root sudo user, however, as you can harm your system if you’re not careful when acting as the root.

Install Zend Guard Loader on Ubuntu 14.04

Step 1. Download Zend Guard Loader packages.

Zend Guard Loader can only be downloaded while logged in to your Zend account. You cannot directly download it to your server. So, you’ll need to download the .tar.gz file and then SFTP it to your server:

http://www.zend.com/products/guard/downloads

After downloading, extract Zend Guard Loader:

tar xzvf name-of-package-file.tar.gz

Now enter the new folder extracted and find the ZendGuardLoader.so file, let’s copy it to the modules folder:

cp ZendGuardLoader.so /usr/lib/php5/

Add these two lines to the bottom of your php.ini to enable Zend Guard Loader:

nano /etc/php5/apache2/php.ini

## Add the following lines ##
[Zend]
zend_extension=/usr/lib/php5/ZendGuardLoader.so
zend_loader.enable=1

Step 2. Restart Apache service.

/etc/init.d/apache2 restart

Step 3. Verify Zend Guard Loader Is Enabled.

#php -m
[PHP Modules]
...
[Zend Modules]
Zend Guard Loader

Congratulations! You have successfully installed Zend Guard Loader. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing the Zend guard loader (Zend Optimizer) on Ubuntu 14.04 system. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you check the official Zend Guard website.