In this guide we reference the following terminal commands: If you’re already familiar with the terminal then feel free to skip to the next section. In order to complete the manual installation of ionCube loader it’s a good idea to first be comfortable with common terminal commands. If you are still using HHVM and need to encrypt PHP files with ionCube then you’ll have to switch to a more standard PHP engine that supports ionCube. So this is only relevant if you’re using an older version of HHVM. However, this is mostly a moot point since HHVM ended support for PHP as of version v3.30. Just as a side note if you’re using HHVM (HipHop Virtual Machine) to process PHP then you need to be aware that ionCube loader doesn’t support HHVM. If you’re not sure about what version you need to download and install then don’t worry we’ll be covering this in detail shortly. Once downloaded you’ll need to install the version of ionCube loader that matches the PHP version running on your server as each available download contains multiple versions of the ionCube loader for all the different versions of PHP. There are various different versions of ionCube loader available, each one designed for a specific system (Linux, Windows, macOS etc.), and 32-bit or 64-bit architectures.

There’s also an online version of the encoder available which includes support for encrypting PHP code for free for testing purposes (more on this below).Īs for the ionCube loader, this is free for anyone to download and install on their server. To encode PHP files you first need to purchase the ionCube encoder. If a PHP application contains proprietary code/algorithms, or software licensing features are required, then using ionCube is an ideal solution to protect your source code. First released in 2002, it’s a PHP extension that decrypts (previously encrypted) code on-the-fly and prepares it for execution along with the rest of the PHP application.

Ioncube decoder php 5.4