Installation prerequisites - just an idea

It would be nice if in installation notes you could also include a list of required php modules.

I was installing BL 6 on my Mac using MacPorts. Tried nginx, then apache2.

Ended up with apache2 installation. In the process I found that the default php installation from macports was missing few php modules required by BL -

  • php80-curl
  • php80-exif
  • php80-gd
  • php80-mbstring
  • php80-zip
  • php-80-sqlite
  • php80-apache2handler

Perhaps not all users will have this problem but it would be helpful to list the required modules so that one can configure php accordingly.

BTW I wanted to use latest version of php (8.4) but could the hard way that apache2handler does yet not compile on MacOS. That’s why I ended with php 8.0

Our expectation is that you’re running on a well-configured PHP server. This is the baseline that you would get from a hosted service. Very few if any PHP applications would run without the majority of those standard modules.

I can look at putting something like this is an appendix of the documentation.

I have reviewed some of our prerequisites. The required modules are specific to the server that you’re installing them on. For Ubuntu 20.04, the modules are:

php
php-xml
php-fpm
php-gd

It is difficult to advise on installing the required base setup for Apache and PHP. Environments vary significantly, including what is included with PHP by default (compiled-in or as modules). “Modules” themselves is a vague term in PHP.

Backlight checks for and advises for missing modules and functions in most cases that we’re aware of. The full list of modules that I’m aware of:

PDO
sqlite3
zip
gd
curl
openssl
intl
mbstring
json
dom
exif

Most of these should be available in the default version of PHP on a server. The method to install them, if needed, depends on the operating or package system and the version of PHP being installed.