This blog post is the first in a series of PHP 7 extension building.

You will be joining me on my journey of discovering how extensions are built. I have never written C code before, or looked deeply into PHP internals. I will make mistakes, and I will try my best to correct them as we go along, but if you notice anything, please email me and i’ll fix it as soon as possible.

Contents

1. Getting Started
2. Hello World
3. Explaining Zend Module Entry

Install Vagrant

The first thing we have to do is install PHP 7 as a development version. The best way to do this is to use a vagrant box built by Rasmus Lerdorf - rasmus/php7dev.

I will be creating a folder in ~/php-extensions/ for each of the extensions created.

Install Vagrant Box

$ vagrant init rasmus/php7dev; vagrant up --provider virtualbox

Once that has completed, you will want to vagrant ssh into the box.

The rest of the series of blog posts will assume we are within the vagrant box.

Check everything is ready

Everything should be ready, but to check type these commands in and you should see something like the below:

$ which phpize
# /usr/local/bin/phpize
$ php --version
# PHP 7.0.11-dev (cli) (built: Aug  3 2016 23:41:41) ( NTS DEBUG )

If you see it all as above then we are ready to continue.

IDE / Text Editor

For PHP extensions you do not need anything special in terms of an IDE, you will be absolutely fine using Sublime Text, Atom, etc. I will be using CLion by JetBrains.