How To Install IonCube Loader on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS

In this tutorial, we will show you how to install IonCube Loader on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, IonCube Loader is a popular PHP extension that enables the execution of encrypted PHP code. This makes it possible for PHP developers to protect their source code from being viewed, modified, or redistributed without their permission.

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 of the IonCube Loader on Ubuntu 22.04 (Jammy Jellyfish). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 22.04 and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint, Elementary OS, Pop!_OS, and more as well.

Prerequisites

• A server running one of the following operating systems: Ubuntu 22.04, 20.04, and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint.
• It’s recommended that you use a fresh OS install to prevent any potential issues.
• An active internet connection. You’ll need an internet connection to download the necessary packages and dependencies for IonCube Loader.
• 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 22.04 LTS Jammy Jellyfish

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
sudo apt install wget apt-transport-https gnupg2 software-properties-common

Step 2. Installing IonCube Loader on Ubuntu 22.04.

By default, IonCube is not available on Ubuntu 22.04 base repository. Now run the following command below to download the latest version of IonCube loader to your Ubuntu system:

wget https://downloads.ioncube.com/loader_downloads/ioncube_loaders_lin_x86-64.tar.gz

Next, extract the downloaded file using the following command:

tar -xvzf ioncube_loaders_lin_x86-64.tar.gz

If you see the extracted files you can see the loaders for each PHP version:

cd ioncube
ls

You will see something similar to this:

ioncube_loader_lin_7.0.so     ioncube_loader_lin_8.1.so
ioncube_loader_lin_7.0_ts.so  ioncube_loader_lin_8.1_ts.so

Step 3. PHP Configuration File.

Once you have downloaded the IonCube Loader, you need to move it to the PHP extension directory. The location of this directory will vary depending on the installation of PHP on your server. You can find the location of the PHP extension directory by running the following command:

php -i | grep extension_dir

You should see the following output:

extension_dir => /usr/lib/php/20230151 => /usr/lib/php/20230151

Next, we check which PHP configuration is working by typing the following command:

 php -i | grep php.ini

Output:

/etc/php/8.1/cli/php.ini (For PHP CLI)
/etc/php/8.1/apache2/php.ini (For PHP with Apache2)

*If you have a different version of PHP installed, the location of the file will be different.

Now open your php.ini file using the following command below:

nano /etc/php/8.1/cli/php.ini

Add the following line at the end of the php.ini file:

zend_extension=/usr/lib/php/20230151/ioncube_loader_lin_8.1.so

Finally, check the installed PHP version from your command line interface, you will see PHP is loaded with IonCube loader:

php -v

Output:

PHP 8.1 (cli) (built: Dec  6 2022 11:36:46) ( NTS )
Copyright (c) The PHP Group
Zend Engine v3.4.0, Copyright (c) Zend Technologies
     with the ionCube PHP Loader + ionCube24 v10.4.5, Copyright (c) 2002-2020, by ionCube Ltd.
     with Zend OPcache v8.0.3, Copyright (c), by Zend Technologies

Congratulations! You have successfully installed IonCube. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing IonCube Loader on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy Jellyfish system. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you check the official IonCube website.