Wednesday 26 October 2011

Apache, php and dlls

For a while now I've been adding more and more features to Apache and PHP for testing. I want to add things like LDAP and SQL support in PHP but the libraries fail to load when I update the PHP.ini file. I have continually come up against error messages like these:

PHP Warning: PHP Startup: Unable to load dynamic library 'c:/php/php_ldap.dll' - The specified module could not be found.\r\n in Unknown on line 0

and

PHP Warning: PHP Startup: Unable to load dynamic library 'c:/php/php_pdo_mysql.dll' - The specified module could not be found.\r\n in Unknown on line 0

The problem I had was actually nothing to do with PHP trying to find these libraries. Instead it was to do with the other libraries that they needed. The Apache logs make no mention of this. You need to search the internet to find which dlls are needed depending on your web server and the dll you wish to include.

For example, running PHP and Apache, to include LDAP, update the php.ini and then also make sure that libeay32.dll and ssleay32.dll are in the Apache bin folder. Then voila! No more nasty errors.

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