How to Install Tideways on My Custom PHP Installation

All the different Tideways packages install the PHP extension for all supported versions into the /usr/lib/tideways directory. Their post install hooks then try to find as many PHP installations as possible based on common conventions on the distribution.

The goal is to link the extension into your PHP’s extension directory and then add the required minimal php ini configuration and if the installer doesn’t find your PHP installation, you need to perform these steps manually.

Find out where the extension directory of your PHP installation is with the following command on the CLI:

php -r 'echo ini_get("extension_dir");'

Or with a script executed from your web-server with the contents:

<?php
// show-extension-dir.php
echo ini_get('extension_dir');

Or from the output of phpinfo by searching for the value of extension_dir.

Example of INI Setting extension_dir on phpinfo output

Then symlink the tideways extension for the correct PHP version to this directory. in this example we assume PHP 8.1 is used:

ln -sf /usr/lib/tideways/tideways-php-8.1.so /path/to/my/extension-directory/tideways.so

Lastly, the minimal necessary configuration to load the tideways extension is:

extension=tideways.so

You then need to restart your Apache webserver or php-fpm to make this configuration visible to your PHP process. From here you can continue to configure Tideways.

Still need help? Email [email protected]