Installing Zend Framework on Cpanel Server

Another quickie for those of you wanting to install the Zend Framework on your Cpanel-powered Web servers.

I'm doing a bunch of updating to another set of Web sites I run (ahem OnlineGameHounds.com... PointlessGames.com, etc. cough) and needed to try out some modules that needed the Zend Framework. I'm not going to go into what that is (read for yourself, please) or why I need it (seriously, I need to get back to that work instead of writing this post! I shouldn't even be here at the bar with you blokes, I've got work to do!). If you need to know how to do this solution, you're likely only reading this because you're searching around for it on the Grand Googly-Moogly, et. al.

If you don't know what this stuff is, well... you're awful bored to be reading around on random posts about words like "Zend" that just look funny, aren't you??!? (Well, you're welcome here, for sure! Look around! :)

Hit the "read more"-type link to get at the problem/solution pair for this thing...

Problem:
How to install Zend Framework (with "Zend Engine", Zend Extension Manager and Zend Optimizer) onto my Cpanel server?

This Worked:
Looking all over for some quick help on how to first check if Zend is installed on my Cpanel-installed server (incidentally, my server is running Red Hat Enterprise Linux), you can just do a version check of PHP from the command prompt of your server: (likely need to log in as root for this, but not sure)

php -v

This should come up with something like this, depending on what was installed:

Well, it looks like I actually have the core Zend Engine installed. I need more though, so let's run a handy script that comes with Cpanel, eh? This script will install the Zend Engine as well as Zend Optimizer and the Zend Extension Manager, which might be something you need/want anyway. Run this command from your root SSH login:

/scripts/installzendopt

This puppy will download the current version of the Zend goodies and install it all with some defaults (also accepting the license agreement, so hopefully you don't mind others making decisions for you! Heh.) After running this script, here's my output of "php -v":

Looks good to me! Happy days... that is, if this is really what I need to get going further on my chosen projects. We'll see about that when I get off of this site and back to my work at www.Bragfile.com... oh, and yes, that was another shameless plug. :P

You really should pay attention and record some of your own notes about the output from the script & Zend installation. For me, the key bit of info was the location that the Zend goodies were installed on the server (I need this info for the Drupal module I'm installing). For me, Zend is located here:

/usr/local/Zend

Another point to note regarding Zend (at least I think it's worth noting) is that Zend, for reasons I won't go into here, relocates the php.ini file (in my case, from /usr/local/lib) to /usr/local/Zend/etc. A symbolic link is created where php.ini was, so you'll still find that link where you're used to seeing the config file for PHP. Oh, btw, the original php.ini file is backed up to "/usr/local/lib/php.ini-zend_optimizer.bak", in case you need that for later... thanks.

That's about it for me on this issue. I've already taken way too much of a detour to write this much info... I really need to get back to this work.

Good luck with your own project!