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Installing ionCube Loader

Valid for Linux Web Hosting packages.

In this guide, we will show you how to install the ionCube Loader in your web hosting package.

The ionCube Loader is a free PHP encoder that encrypts your PHP files. This protects your website from observation, modification and theft.

 

  • Open the page http://www.ioncube.com/loaders.php

  • Download the ionCube Loader package to your local computer. Find the table with the heading Production Loaders and click on the zip link in the Linux (64 bits) line.

  • Unzip the ZIP file with a ZIP program (e.g. WinZIP).

  • Move all files with the extension .so from the unzipped archive to the directory /htdocs/ioncube. If the directory does not exist, simply create a folder with the name ioncube.

  • As the ZEND optimizer is pre-installed as standard in the IONOS web hosting packages, the ionCube Loader must be integrated as a ZEND extension. To do this, create a php.ini file in the directory of your PHP scripts, andadd a line of code to it according to the following pattern:

    zend_extension =/homepages/12/d123456789/htdocs/ioncube/ioncube_loader_lin_x.x.so 

    In this example, /12/d123456789/htdocs/ioncube/ stands for the path to the ioncube directory in your webspace. ioncube_loader_lin_x.x.so represents the .so file that matches your PHP version. For PHP 7.4, for example, this is ioncube_loader_lin_7.4.so.

    If you do not know the path to your webspace, you can connect to your web space via SSH and then use the pwd command to display the path to the current directory.

  • Finally, copy the php.ini created above into all directories of your website or application that contain .php files. This is necessary because php.ini only affects the directory in which it is located. If you have a web hosting package with SSH access, you can also let this shell script do the possibly time-consuming job of copying.