Professional LAMP: Linux®, Apache, MySQL®, and PHP5 Web Development

12.2. eAccelerator

eAccelerator is another compiled-state PHP caching engine, similar to APC. eAccelerator is a fork of the popular TurckMMCache caching engine for PHP4, and is a free encoder and optimizer currently maintained by Frank Alcantara and a team of SourceForge programmers.

In addition to being a PHP optimizer and caching engine, you can use eAccelerator to encode your PHP scripts, so you can redistribute the encoded version to clients that have eAccelerator installed, without fear of source code snooping.

As with other PHP encoding solutions, when files are encoded using eAccelerator, they are nearly impossible to decrypt using standard tools. They can, however, be reverse-engineered using debuggers and disassemblers on the PHP engine itself, but usually such an effort is not warranted by the possible reward.

12.2.1. Installing eAccelerator

Like APC, eAccelerator can be installed as a DSO, using the following process. First, download a copy of the source code, available at http://eaccelerator.net/.

Unfortunately, at this time eAccelerator is not compatible with the CGI binary version of PHP. If you run the CGI binary version, this section is for information purposes only.

Extract the tarball that you downloaded, and then go into the newly created directory:

tar -xvzf eaccelerator-0.9.3.tar.gz
cd eaccelerator-0.9.3

Run your copy of phpize in this directory (again, chane paths accordingly):

/usr/local/bin/phpize

Then, configure the source, and build the binaries: ...