How To Install IonCube Loader on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS

In this tutorial, we will show you how to install IonCube Loader on Ubuntu 20.04 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 through the step by step installation IonCube Loader on a Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (Focal Fossa). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 18.04, 16.04, and any other Debian based distribution like Linux Mint.

Prerequisites

• A server running one of the following operating systems: Ubuntu 20.04, 18.04, and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint or elementary OS.
• It’s recommended that you use a fresh OS install to prevent any potential issues.
• 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 20.04 LTS Focal Fossa

Step 1. First, make sure that all your system packages are up-to-date by running the following apt commands in the terminal.

sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade

Step 2. Installing IonCube Loaders on Ubuntu 20.04.

Now we download the latest IonCube loaders PHP modules from the IonCube download page:

wget http://downloads3.ioncube.com/loader_downloads/ioncube_loaders_lin_x86-64.tar.gz
tar xzf ioncube_loaders_lin_x86-64.tar.gz -C /usr/local

After that, 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:

Configuration File (php.ini) Path => /etc/php/7.4/cli
Loaded Configuration File => /etc/php/7.4/cli/php.ini

Step 3. Configure ionCube Loader in PHP.

Now, edit the required PHP configuration files or you may update all the configuration files found above:

 zend_extension = /usr/local/ioncube/ioncube_loader_lin_7.4.so

Step 4. Testing IonCube on Ubuntu 20.04.

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 20.04 system.

php -v

Results:

PHP 7.4.8 (cli) (built: Sep 24 2020 16:46:36) ( NTS )
Copyright (c) The PHP Group
Zend Engine v3.4.0, Copyright (c) Zend Technologies
    with the ionCube PHP Loader + ionCube24 v10.4.1, Copyright (c) 2002-2020, by ionCube Ltd.
    with Zend OPcache v7.4.8, Copyright (c), by Zend Technologies

Congratulations! You have successfully installed IonCube. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing the IonCube Loader on your Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Focal Fossa system. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you check the official IonCube website.