How To Install IonCube Loader on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS

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In this tutorial, we will show you how to install IonCube Loader on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, IonCube Loaders is basically an encryption/decryption utility for PHP applications that 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 the step-by-step installation Vesta Control Panel on a Ubuntu 16.04 (Xenial Xerus) server.

Prerequisites

• A server running one of the following operating systems: Ubuntu 16.04 (Xenial Xerus).
• 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 IonCube Loader on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS

Step 1. First, make sure that all your system packages are up-to-date by running the 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 the 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 the ionCube loader version, meaning you have successfully installed and configured the 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.

Congratulations! 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 check the official IonCube website.

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