How to Install ionCube Loader in Ubuntu 18.04 & 16.04

Install PHP Ioncube Loaders in Ubuntu & Debian . Ioncube is used as the encryption and decryption utility for PHP applications by which we can keep safe our data. It also can restrict PHP application to execute unauthorized. It also assists in speeding up the pages that are served. IonCube loaders are used for decoding encoded files while running on the webserver. read more details on official site. This tutorial will help you to install PHP Ioncube Loaders module in Ubuntu 19.10, 18.04 and 16.04 systems.

• How to Install Ioncube Loader in CentOS/RHEL 7/6/5
• How to Install Ioncube Loader in WHM/cPanel

Step 1 – Download Ioncube Loaders

First of all download the latest ioncube loaders php modules from ioncube from ioncube download page. Alternatively you can also use following command to download ioncube loaders.

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wget http://downloads3.ioncube.com/loader_downloads/ioncube_loaders_lin_x86-64.tar.gz

Then, extract the downloaded archive under /usr/local directory.

tar xzf ioncube_loaders_lin_x86-64.tar.gz -C /usr/local

Step 2 – Enable ionCube Loader in PHP

Find out the PHP configuration files for the PHP version you need to install ionCube loader. The below command will show the PHP CLI configuration file location for the current active PHP version.

php -i | grep php.ini

Configuration File (php.ini) Path => /etc/php/7.3/cli
Loaded Configuration File => /etc/php/7.3/cli/php.ini

As per the result of above command, PHP 7.3 is the active version for PHP CLI. Generally, the same version will be active for Apache too, but you can check it by phpinfo(); function in web browser.

For PHP 7.3, the default the configuration file locations are:

sudo vim /etc/php/7.3/cli/php.ini      #for PHP CLI 
sudo vim /etc/php/7.3/fpm/php.ini      #for PHP FPM 
sudo vim /etc/php/7.3/apache/php.ini   #for PHP with Apache 

Edit all the above configuration files and append the below code to the end of the files.

 zend_extension = /usr/local/ioncube/ioncube_loader_lin_7.3.so

Replace /usr/local/ioncube/ioncube_loader_lin_7.23.so file with your matching PHP version file.

Step 3 – Restart Apache & PHP-FPM Service

After making changes in php.ini for Apache or PHP-FPM, you need to restart the following services.

sudo systemctl restart apache2      #for PHP with Apache 
sudo systemctl restart php7.3-fpm      #for PHP FPM 

Step 4 – Verify ionCube Loader

Let’s verify the installation and configuration of Ioncube PHP module. Run php -m command on shell.

php -v

PHP 7.3.14-6+ubuntu16.04.1+deb.sury.org+1 (cli) (built: Feb  5 2020 16:51:13) ( NTS )
Copyright (c) 1997-2018 The PHP Group
Zend Engine v3.3.14, Copyright (c) 1998-2018 Zend Technologies
    with the ionCube PHP Loader + ionCube24 v10.3.9, Copyright (c) 2002-2019, by ionCube Ltd.
    with Zend OPcache v7.3.14-6+ubuntu16.04.1+deb.sury.org+1, Copyright (c) 1999-2018, by Zend Technologies

Alternatively, you can also put an phpinfo.php file on your web server document root with the following content and check the status by access info.php in a web browser.

• How to Install PHP 7 on Ubuntu

<?php
   phpinfo();
?>