How To Install IonCube Loader on Debian 9 Stretch

In this tutorial, we will show you how to install IonCube Loader on Debian 9 Stretch. For those of you who didn’t know, IonCube Loader 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 IonCube Loader on a Debian 9 (Stretch) server.

Prerequisites

• A server running one of the following operating systems: Debian 9 (Stretch).
• 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 Debian 9 Stretch

Step 1. Before we install any software, it’s important to make sure your system is up to date by running the following apt-get commands in the terminal:

apt-get update
apt-get upgrade

Step 2. Install the LAMP server.

A Debian 9 LAMP server is required. If you do not have LAMP installed, you can follow our guide here.

Step 3. Installing IonCube Loader on Debian 9.

First, download the latest ionCube loaders archive file run the following wget command:

wget https://downloads.ioncube.com/loader_downloads/ioncube_loaders_lin_x86-64.tar.gz
tar -xf ioncube_loaders_lin_x86-64.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 Debian 9.

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 Debian 9 system.

php -v

Results:

PHP 7.0.30-0+deb9u1 (cli) (built: Jun 16 2018 16:18:36) ( NTS )
Copyright (c) 1997-2017 The PHP Group
Zend Engine v3.0.0, Copyright (c) 1998-2017 Zend Technologies
    with the ionCube PHP Loader (enabled) + Intrusion Protection from ioncube24.com (unconfigured) v10.2.4, Copyright (c) 2002-2018, by ionCube Ltd.
    with Zend OPcache v7.0.30-0+deb9u1, Copyright (c) 1999-2017, by Zend Technologies

Congratulations! You have successfully installed IonCube. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing IonCube Loader on Debian 9 Stretch system. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you check the official IonCube website.