Enable ZTS Support on Ubuntu 14.04

Question

Hi,i’ve installed everything that regards PHP from the repository. I’ve installed php5-dev package and all other dependencies to run pthreads on my droplet.I don’t understand how to enable the ZTS on it…what should i do?Do i have to download PHP5 from another source? Thanks.

Andrew SB · Answer

ZTS support is a configure time option and can not be enabled at run time. You’ll need to build php yourself with the --enable-maintainer-zts flag in order to enable it.

One way to do this is to modify the existing package and rebuild it. First we’ll need to install and download a few things:

Install the build dependencies:

sudo apt-get build-dep php5

Install the developer tools:

sudo apt-get install devscripts

Download the source:

apt-get source php5

Now enter the source directory and edit the debian/rules file:

cd php5-5.5.9+dfsg/    # The version will be different depending on the Ubuntu release
nano debian/rules

Find the section starting with COMMON_CONFIG=--build=$(DEB_BUILD_GNU_TYPE) \ and add the following configure flags:

                --enable-maintainer-zts \
                --enable-pthreads \

Then we want to bump the version number for the package, so that it is higher than the version of PHP in the repository. Run dch -i and create a new changelog entry:

php5 (5.5.9+dfsg-1ubuntu4.5+zts1) trusty; urgency=medium

  * Rebuild with ZTS support.

 -- You <doesnt@matter.com>  Mon, 10 Nov 2014 13:14:32 -0500

Now the package can be built using the command:

DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS=nocheck debuild

This will take quite awhile and will also require some memory. If you’re on a 512mb server, you’ll probably need to add some swap.

It will produce a number of packages in the parent directory:

cd ..
ls *deb

You can now install the individual packages with sudo dpkg -i pakage_name.deb or all of them with sudo dpkg -i *deb

Andrew SB · Answer