Installing ionCube loaders on your Media Temple (dv) 4.0 Server

Time Required: 15 Minutes Knowledge Assumed: Basic editing/saving files though Terminal

One of the drawbacks of upgrading to the Media Temple (dv) 4.0 is that by default PHP 5.3 doesn’t have the ionCube loaders installed, heres a quick guide on getting sites that require ionCube loaders running again.

Of course you’ll be needing root access to do this so you’ll need root access and the developer tools enabled in the Media Temple account centre. Once you’re successfully SSH’d into your server create a new folder somewhere memorable to download files so things don’t get messy.

cd /usr

mkdir downloads

cd downloads

Next you’ll need to download the correct ionCube loader package like this:

wget http://downloads2.ioncube.com/loader_downloads/ioncube_loaders_lin_x86-64.tar.gz

Untar the loaders using the following command:

tar -zxvf ioncube_loaders_lin_x86-64.tar.gz

cd ioncube

Move the PHP 5.3 loader module to where the rest of the modules are to ensure it gets loaded properly:

mv ioncube_loader_lin_5.3.so /usr/lib64/php/modules

Next we need to tell PHP to load these new modules, to do this you can create an .ini file. Change directory to /etc/php.d and we’ll make the file in there.

cd /etc/php.d

Create the following .ini file using this command (vi automatically creates a file that doesn’t exist):

vi 20ioncube.ini

Add in the following as the first line of the and save/close.

zend_extension = /usr/lib64/php/modules/ioncube_loader_lin_5.3.so

Finally you’ll need to restart httpd for the module to be loaded like this:

/etc/init.d/httpd restart

That’s all there is to it! You should now be able to successfully run ionCube encoded files.