How To Install IonCube Loader on CentOS 7

In this tutorial, we will show you how to install IonCube Loader on CentOS 7. 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 ionCube Loader in CentOS  7 server.

Prerequisites

• A server running one of the following operating systems: CentOS  7.
• 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 CentOS 7

Step 1. First, let’s start by ensuring your system is up-to-date.

sudo yum -y update

Step 2. Install LAMP server.

A CentOS 7 LAMP server is required. If you do not have LAMP installed, you can follow our guide here.

Step 3. Install IonCube Loaders.

Download and extract the latest stable version IonCube, We will use the wget the 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 extension_dir
extension_dir => /usr/lib64/php/modules => /usr/lib64/php/modules

Open the extracted IonCube folder and copy the IonCube loader file match to your PHP version:

cd ioncube
cp ioncube/ioncube_loader_lin_5.4.so /usr/lib64/php/modules

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/lib64/php/modules/ioncube_loader_lin_5.4.so

Now, we can restart Apache so that the changes take place:

systemctl restart httpd.service

Step 4. Testing ionCube on CentOS 7.

If you can see the version of PHP with ionCube loader version, meaning you have successfully installed and configured IonCube PHP loader in your CentOS 7 system.

php -v

Results:

PHP 5.4.16 (cli) (built: Jun 28 2015 22:15:27)
   Copyright (c) 1997-2013 The PHP Group
   Zend Engine v2.4.0, Copyright (c) 1998-2013 Zend Technologies
   with the ionCube PHP Loader (enabled) + Intrusion Protection from ioncube24.com (unconfigured) v5.0.18, Copyright (c) 2002-2015, by ionCube Ltd.

Congratulations! You have successfully installed IonCube Loader. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing IonCube Loader in CentOS 7 system. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you check the official IonCube website.

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