Bluehost Hacks

This tutorial has been tailored to and tested for Bluehost.com's shared servers, but it should work on pretty much any shared host that allows SSH access (your mileage may vary). If your host falls short, quit settling and try Bluehost.

I regularly get requests to install PDFlib Lite on servers, but have to turn them down due to licensing concerns (installing software licensed for personal use on a business machine with 450 users can be tricky), now you can install it on your own. Let’s get started by first installing PDFLib Lite.

Grab the source package

cd ~/tmp/
wget http://www.pdflib.com/binaries/PDFlib/703/PDFlib-Lite-7.0.3.tar.gz

Unpack the archive

tar xvzf PDFlib-Lite-7.0.3.tar.gz

Compile PDFlib Lite

cd PDFlib-Lite-7.0.3
./configure --prefix=$HOME/usr --without-java
make
make install

You may see an error about a failure to copy to /usr/local/lib for Python and Perl. You can safely ignore it. If it bothers you that much, add --without-python --without-perl to the configure and re-make install.

Build the PDFlib DSO for PHP

cd ~/tmp
pecl download pdflib
tar xvzf pdflib-*.tgz
cd pdflib-*
phpize
./configure --with-pdflib=$HOME/usr
make

At this point, you have a built pdf.so file in ~/tmp/pdflib-*/modules. Copy it somewhere safe. I like to create an extension directory locally for all my extensions (you need to create it if doesn’t already exist).

cp ~/tmp/pdflib-*/modules/pdf.so ~/extensions

Now to implement it. Add/ modify the following in your php.ini:

extension_dir=/home/<username>/extensions
extension=pdf.so

Note: If you depend on system installed extensions (ie. PDO_MySQL) you will need to copy them into your local extension directory.

cp /usr/lib/php/extensions/*/* ~/extensions

This copy may be unpredictable if there are multiple no-debug-non-zts- directories. If so, copy the extensions from the newer directory.