Installation

To install Zephir, please follow these steps:

Prerequisites

To build a PHP extension and use Zephir you need the following requirements:

  • Zephir parser >= 1.1.0
  • A C compiler such as gcc >= 4.4 or an alternative such as clang >= 3.0, Visual C++ >= 11 or Intel C++. It is recommended to use gcc 4.4 or later
  • re2c 0.13.6 or later
  • PHP development headers and tools

For Linux based systems you’ll need also:

  • GNU make 3.81 or later
  • autoconf 2.31 or later
  • automake 1.14 or later
  • libpcre3
  • The build-essential package when using gcc on Ubuntu (and likely in other distributions as well)

If you’re using Ubuntu, you can install the required packages this way:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install git gcc make re2c php php-json php-dev libpcre3-dev build-essential

Please note that specific versions of libraries and programs at the time of reading this guide may vary.

Since Zephir is written in PHP, you need to have a recent version of PHP installed, and it must be available in your console:

php -v
PHP 7.0.8 (cli) (built: Jun 26 2016 00:59:31) ( NTS )
Copyright (c) 1997-2016 The PHP Group
Zend Engine v3.0.0, Copyright (c) 1998-2016 Zend Technologies
        with Zend OPcache v7.0.8, Copyright (c) 1999-2016, by Zend Technologies

Also, make sure you have the PHP development libraries installed along with your PHP installation:

phpize -v
Configuring for:
PHP Api Version:         20151012
Zend Module Api No:      20151012
Zend Extension Api No:   320151012

You don’t have to necessarily see the exact above output, but it’s important that these commands are available to start developing with Zephir.

Installing Zephir

Git Way

First make sure that the Zephir parser extension is installed and activated. You can follow this tutorial.

The Zephir compiler currently must be cloned from Github:

git clone https://github.com/zephir-lang/zephir

Run the Zephir installer:

cd zephir
./install -c

The last thing you need is to make sure you have all the necessary dependencies and install additional PHP libraries:

composer install

This step is optional for version 0.10.x, however, it will become mandatory in future versions.

Testing the Installation

Check if Zephir is available from any directory by executing:

zephir help