How To Install ionCube on Ubuntu 20.04

ionCube is PHP extension that is used to load ionCube encoded PHP files. ionCube is used to protect commercial PHP scripts by encoding it, so no one can read the actual PHP code.

First, download ioncube loader from

cd /usr/local/src
wget https://downloads.ioncube.com/loader_downloads/ioncube_loaders_lin_x86-64.tar.gz
tar xvf ioncube_loaders_lin_x86-64.tar.gz
cd ioncube/

Find extension directory and copy .so file to PHP extension directory. To find PHP extension directory run

php -i | grep  extension_dir

On my installation, i have PHP extension_dir set to /usr/lib/php/20190902. If it’s different for you, change the path in the following command.

For PHP 7.4, run

cp /usr/local/src/ioncube/ioncube_loader_lin_7.4.so /usr/lib/php/20190902

Enable ioncube

echo "zend_extension=ioncube_loader_lin_7.4.so" > /etc/php/7.4/mods-available/ioncube.ini
ln -s /etc/php/7.4/mods-available/ioncube.ini /etc/php/7.4/cli/conf.d/01-ioncube.ini

for Apache, run

ln -s /etc/php/7.4/mods-available/ioncube.ini /etc/php/7.4/apache2/conf.d/01-ioncube.ini
systemctl restart apache2

for php-fpm, run

ln -s /etc/php/7.4/mods-available/ioncube.ini /etc/php/7.4/fpm/conf.d/01-ioncube.ini
systemctl restart php7.4-fpm