quikstorm

Alright, so after spending the last 3 nights trying to successfully make eAccelerator work with php5 on my new Dreamhost accout, i finally have it working! So, for the sake of remembering how to do it myself, and to help out all the rest of you out there — I’ve assembled this guide for you. Citing my references and extending my thanks — I probably wouldn’t have figured this all out without the wonderful, yet slightly dated guide at robinz.info.

To begin with — I read many tutorials reporting that to make this possible you HAD to roll your own php binary, meaning compiling it from source and using some ugly shell scripts from the dreamhost wiki to even think about getting this to work — however — I have found that this was not the case — rather — gave me many more problems than the alternative — using the default php5.cgi provided by dreamhost, and directing it to a different, local customized php.ini.

First, we have to get and build eAccelerator. Of course — we cant just ‘apt-get install eAccelerator’ or anything slick like that (i do like my ubuntu ) — so were going to have to acquire the sources and build it from scratch.

Building Dependencies

eAccelerator requires autoconf, automake, libtool, and m4. Of these, libtool and m4 are already provided on our host by default — the other two — you guessed it — were building from source.

All of the following must be performed while logged in with a shell account.

Install autoconf

• wget http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/autoconf/autoconf-2.61.tar.gz
• tar -xvzf autoconf-2.61.tar.gz
• cd autoconf-2.61
• ./configure –prefix=$HOME/gnu
• make
• make install
• export PATH=$PATH:$HOME/gnu <– this is so automake and eAccelerator can find the new autoconf binaries

Install automake

• wget http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/automake/automake-1.9.tar.gz
• tar -xvzf automake-1.9.tar.gz
• ./configure –prefix=$HOME/gnu
• make
• make install

Installing eAccelerator

• wget http://bart.eaccelerator.net/source/0.9.5.1/eaccelerator-0.9.5.1.tar.bz2
• tar -xjf eaccelerator-0.9.5.1.tar.bz2
• cd eaccelerator-0.9.5
• export PHP_PREFIX=/usr/local/php5/bin
• $PHP_PREFIX/phpize
• ./configure –prefix=$HOME/gnu –enable-eaccelerator-shared –with-php-config=$PHP_PREFIX/php-config
• make
• mkdir $HOME/phpini
• mkdir $HOME/phpini/lib
• cp modules/eaccelerator.so $HOME/phpini

Getting our own php.ini

• cp /etc/php5/cgi/php.ini $HOME/phpini/php.ini
• thats it!

Modifying our own php.ini

• open php.ini in a text editor (VIM) — this wont be covered here — many other great tutorials for using vim are available
• modify the ‘extension_dir’ setting to point to /home/YOUR_USER_NAME/phpini/lib
• under the ‘dynamic extensions section — add the following lines of code
  • extension=”eaccelerator.so”
  • eaccelerator.shm_size=”16″
  • eaccelerator.cache_dir=”/home/YOUR_USER_NAME/tmp/eaccelerator
  • eaccelerator.enable=”1″
  • eaccelerator.optimizer=”1″
  • eaccelerator.check_mtime=”1″
  • eaccelerator.debug=”0″
  • eaccelerator.filter=”"
  • eaccelerator.shm_max=”0″
  • eaccelerator.shm_ttl=”0″
  • eaccelerator.shm_prune_period=”0″
  • eaccelerator.shm_only=”0″
  • eaccelerator.compress=”0″
  • eaccelerator.compress_level=”9″ <– not completely necessary since we set compress=”0″ (off). Necessary if you wish to enable cache compression
• run mkdir -p $HOME/tmp/eaccelerator to create your tmp folder

Getting your site to use fastcgi (eaccelerator wont cache anything under reguler cgi)

• cd $HOME/YOUR_DOMAIN_NAME
• create a new text file named ‘fastcgi.fcgi’ and put the following lines of code in it containing the following lines:
  • #!/bin/sh
  • export PHPRC=/home/YOUR_USER_NAME/phpini
  • export PHP_FCGI_CHILDREN=3 <– this may have to change from 3 to 2 — determines how many process of fastcgi wait idle
  • exec /dh/cgi-system/php5.cgi
• save the file — it must stay in the root of your webroot ( $HOME/YOUR_DOMAIN_NAME )
• create a new text file named ‘.htaccess’ (note the ‘.’ (dot) — its important)
• place the following lines in this file
  • AddHandler fastcgi-script fcg fcgi fpl
  • AddHandler php5-fastcgi .php
  • Action php5-fastcgi /fastcgi.fcgi
  • Options +ExecCGI
• save this file

Now all that is left is to kill any existing fastcgi process that may be running (in case you were happening to mess with this earlier — or got part way and something didn’t work.

execute this command ‘killall php5.cgi’

and all processes named ‘php5.cgi’ under your username should be terminated.

create a phpinfo.php file under your document root for the site you just configured — putting the following in it

<?php phpinfo() ?>

save the file — open a web browser and point it to http://YOUR_DOMAIN/phpinfo.php

IF there is a section for eAccelerator — and it says there are scripts cached — congratulations! It worked! (You may have to open a few other php pages on your site first to make sure the number grows past the single file that is phpinfo.php.

Good Luck — and if you can get it to work like I did — enjoy your significantly faster web hosting experience!

-neverland