14.8.1.Building the Virtuoso Server With PHP Extension

  1. Firstly you need to have the PHP4 library installed with Zend and ODBC interface enabled. On UNIX-es this can be enabled by doing 'configure --enable-experimental-zts --with-iodbc'. On Windows the library must be downloaded from the php.net site.

  2. Make sure that the iODBC library is installed if you are preparing to build on UNIX platform.

  3. Make the bif_server_php executable in the bifsdk/examples/ directory. This same directory contains the source file for the bif_server_php executable: bif_server_php.cpp.

The Virtuoso distribution may already contain a binary executable of the PHP extension of the Virtuoso's Web Service. In which case you may skip the build process and start the server with the PHP extensions instead of starting the normal virtuoso server executable.

To start and test the Virtuoso server with the PHP extension do the following:

  1. Make a simple file 'info.php' and place it in the HTTP root directory. The content of the info.php file should be the single line:

    <?phpinfo();?>
    

    This function produces an HTML page containing various PHP processor information.

  2. Start the server. For Linux platform: bif_server_php -f, for Windows platform: bif_server_php-odbc-t.exe -f

  3. Test the installation by entering the http://[host:port]/info.php as the URL of a browser of your choosing.

[Note] Note:

Windows users will need to install the php4ts.dll (from the php.net site) before running the PHP enabled Virtuoso server. This DLL must be in the system path when Virtuoso starts and can typically be placed in the %SYSTEMROOT% directory without any path modifications.

[Note] Note:

The PHP library used with Virtuoso must be version 4.3.1 or greater. From this version the PHP library includes a serious PHP CGI vulnerability fix, without which the Virtuoso server will fail to start for security reasons.