What you will need

• Patience

• The CVS version of SRM, as well as PHP v 4.2 or greater. (the sources) On my Debian Woody box, I needed to use the 4.2 Source Tarball, as well as the 4.3 CVS version.

• autoconf 2.52, automake 1.4 or automake 1.5, libtool 1.4. (you need these to build the php cvs version)

• The will to install and test this thing. This is beta software, and it does take some tweaking. If you are Joe Server Admin, chances are you already know what you are doing, and know exactly how to do this. If you are Fred Webguy on the other hand... there might be pain involved.

• The ability to read docs! All kinds of docs! If you try these instructions, and it breaks, than read the instillation docs, from the web, in the source directory...everywhere.

Where to go for more help

if you have an IRC client, you can always hop onto EFNet and ask around in channel #vl-srm

You can also join the mailing list

Thanks you's

• Everyone in #vl-srm who helped me out.

• Zak Greant and Trevor "Skinneet" For helping make this document better.

This is actually rather easy, and I was able to compile the SRMD server, as well as the libraries with the least amount of pain.

Its as easy as going to /usr/local/src/srm-CVS/srm and typing in the following things:

Than let it do its thing. with any luck it will not spit out any errors at you.

After that, you have to tell the compiler what kind of options you want with your copy of SRM. I started with just a basic debug config, and figured I would add to it once I got more comfortable with SRM.

I found it extremely handy to write up a little script that handles my configure options. Mine is named srmdConfigure, and this is what it looks like.

Pretty tiny huh? The reason why I did it this way tho, is so I know exactly what kind of configure options I built with srm. A full list of compile options is available here: http://www.vl-srm.net/doc/admin.compile.php

now, run that little script

The next thing to do is to make the thing. This is pretty easy. Just type:

This compiles everything.

After that, all you have to do is Install it. That's as easy as typing in:

The final thing that you need to do is deal with the srm.ini. First put it in /etc. If you can't find it.. it is probably located in /usr/local/srm/sbin. If you still can't find it, try:

Finally, you should edit the srm.ini file, and set up all the options. If you ended up using the srmdConfigure script, you will need to turn off the 'load "auth";' and 'load "http";' lines, by putting a # in front of it. (I've included my own srm.ini so you can have a look). You can also change the banana classpath (which is where all your banana's will live, as you can see, i put mine in /var/srm/ ) and the function_library.

One quick note. You will have to make sure that the PHP file that is your function library exists. (that's OK, it can be a PHP file that looks like <?php ?>). You might want to use the one I have provided called "library.php", this will help in testing your SRM installation.

What did you just do? You just compiled the SRM Daemon (programmed in C) that will handle the raw requests from your PHP scripts on the web server. the SRM Daemon can't run PHP scripts yet.

Making SRM Speak PHP

SRM will only work with PHP 4.3.0 and higher, you need to get the source for this version from CVS.

Anonymous CVS access to PHP is available here: http://www.php.net/anoncvs.php

First you need to copy the SAPI (sapi_srm), and the extension (php_srm) sources of SRM into your PHP source directory.

Assuming your PHP source lives in /usr/local/src/php4 it is as simple as

(this copies the SRM extension into PHP's extension directory) next, you need to copy the SAPI... and you guessed it..

Remove the configure file that is in your /usr/local/src/php4 directory:

than you want to do a

in the php4 directory. This builds the php4 configure.

If you want to test and make sure you can build PHP with the SRM modules, by doing this:

and you should see (something like ) this:

--with-srm-sapi[=DIR]   Include SRM-SAPI support                              
--with-srm[=DIR]        Include SRM: Script Running Magic (http://www.vl-srm.net/) support
--with-tsrm-pth[=pth-config]    Use GNU Pth.
--with-tsrm-st
--with-tsrm-pthreads    Use POSIX threads (default)
   

If not, you haven't got the srm SAPI and/or the SRM extension in the php4/sapi and php4/ext sections of your source.

After it is done, we need to configure PHP 4. This is where I found the use of a script extremely beneficial. Because if this step breaks, and you have to do this all over again, its just right here for you.

It also makes adding new modules very easy. So which much further ado, here is my configure script, I called it sapiConfigure.

An important thing to realize is that SRM doesn't officially support shared modules.. and it is "not a good idea to use shared modules with SRM". I would just follow that advice.

I am not going to go into every line by line detail, you can find out what is going on by checking out http://www.php.net/manual/en/install.configure.php .

In case you don't know, the \ 's in the script, tell your shell (hopefully) that even tho there is a CR at the end of this line, don't interpret the code right away.

At the end of the file, there is a bunch of options commented out ( i.e. #--with-exif) These are options that I may or may not want to add in the future. If you want to add modules to the SRM PHP engine, go ahead, But don't just un-comment them out! make sure that all the commented out config options stay together... i.e.

This is correct:

This is WRONG! (and will break your sapiConfigure script):

Why does this break things? Because when your shell interpreter runs into the first comment .. it assumes that your multi-line command is finished... when really its not.

Also, make sure that the --with-srm and --with-srm-sapi options have =/usr/local/srm after them (like I do), Your milage might very if you used the --prefix option, in compiling SRM.

You are compiling the SRM-SAPI (basically the thing that makes SRM speak in PHP) library. You are also compiling in the SRM extension because the server needs some functions it provides to run. So just to re-iterate, you are compiling both the SRM extension and the SRM-SAPI extension for the SRM-SAPI library. (phew)

Now, weather you think you need it or not, do this! make clean and make distclean because we are going to have to rebuild PHP for your web server (later).

Serve Me up, Compiling PHP

Did you make clean and make distclean in your php4 source directory yet? no? Bad admin! No Cookie!

Now we have to build the srm client with the server module of choice. (probably Apache) this means leaving out the --with-srm-sapi option.

If you are currently using a pre-built .deb or .rpm of PHP, you will want to make a quick phpinfo() page, and get the "Configure Command" setting, its the third option down. You can't miss it. Copy this, and save it somewhere. You might want to know why (for instance) half your scripts that required gd, curl, shmop, and any number of other modules don't work ;)

Now, you probably want to write up another configure script.. I called this one srmApacheConfigure, for obvious reasons. In this compile, we do not need to worry about shared modules, so if you use them, no worries!

OK, remember that configure line you grabbed? you want to compare that with what is here, specifically if there is a --prefix option (and what the directory is after it), as well as --with-layout, and --with-config-file-path. (if your previous version was a .deb, than you should be able to use this configure just fine.

Additionally, the --with-apxs line may not be applicable to you at all, check out Configure Server Options. Again, check your previous configure to see what it was before.

Than, all you have to do is

and you have PHP ready to talk to srm! If you did everything right, than all you need to do is restart your webserver!