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Askr
Building

Building

Askr has two build steps:

  1. Build an embed-enabled, non-ZTS libphp (once).
  2. Build the askr binary with cargo (links libphp).

Requirements

  • Rust (stable; rustup).
  • A C toolchain (build-essential on Ubuntu, Xcode Command Line Tools on macOS).
  • On Ubuntu: pkg-config + PHP dependency dev libraries (below).
  • On macOS: nothing extra — the script builds the PHP dependencies from source as static libraries.

No autoconf/re2c/bison are needed: official PHP release tarballs ship a ready configure and pre-generated lexers/parsers.

Step 1 — build libphp

scripts/build-libphp.sh downloads a PHP release, configures a non-ZTS embed build, and installs it under vendor/php-build/install/ (git-ignored).

Profiles

Profile Extensions Use
minimal (default) core only the embedding spike / running tests
laravel everything a real Laravel 12/13 app needs serving real apps 
# Minimal (fast, ~15s) — enough for `cargo test`
./scripts/build-libphp.sh

# Full Laravel profile
PROFILE=laravel ./scripts/build-libphp.sh

Override the PHP version with PHP_VERSION=8.4.x ./scripts/build-libphp.sh.

Ubuntu

Install the dependency dev libraries first — PHP's configure finds them via pkg-config:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install -y build-essential pkg-config curl \
  libssl-dev libxml2-dev libonig-dev libsqlite3-dev
PROFILE=laravel ./scripts/build-libphp.sh
# -> vendor/php-build/install/lib/libphp.so

macOS

No system libraries needed — the script builds oniguruma, OpenSSL and libxml2 from source as static libs and links them in (fully self-contained, no brew, no pkg-config):

PROFILE=laravel ./scripts/build-libphp.sh
# -> vendor/php-build/install/lib/libphp.dylib

Step 2 — build Askr

cargo build --release   # target/release/askr

askr-php's build.rs discovers PHP via vendor/php-build/install/bin/php-config, compiles the shim, links libphp, and bakes in an rpath to the install's lib/ so the binary finds libphp.{so,dylib} at runtime.

To use a different PHP install, point ASKR_PHP_CONFIG at another embed-enabled, non-ZTS php-config before building:

ASKR_PHP_CONFIG=/opt/php/bin/php-config cargo build --release

The extension matrix

Booting a real Laravel app surfaces, in order, which extensions it needs. The laravel profile provides them:

Symptom without it Extension Provided by
Call to undefined function mb_split() mbstring (mbregex) oniguruma
Call to undefined function openssl_* openssl OpenSSL
Class "DOMDocument" not found dom / xml / simplexml libxml2
— pdo_sqlite, tokenizer, session, ctype, filter, fileinfo, phar, bcmath, pcntl, posix, opcache bundled / built-in

On Ubuntu these come from the -dev packages via pkg-config. On macOS the script builds oniguruma/OpenSSL/libxml2 statically (the SDK's libxml2 is too old for PHP 8.4's ext/dom).

opcache

opcache is built (as a zend_extension) but not auto-loaded. Enable it via the INI (see Configuration):

OPCACHE=$(ls vendor/php-build/install/lib/php/extensions/*/opcache.so)
export ASKR_PHP_INI=$'zend_extension='"$OPCACHE"$'\nopcache.enable=1\nopcache.enable_cli=1\nopcache.validate_timestamps=0'

Confirm your build with askr doctor (see CLI).

Continuous integration

.github/workflows/ci.yml builds a minimal libphp on Ubuntu, then runs rustfmt --check, clippy -D warnings, the tests, and a release build; a second job compiles the full laravel-profile libphp.so against apt dev libraries and asserts the build is non-ZTS.

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