Starting today, we’re introducing a series of posts through which we intend to bring you the latest updates from our developers and tech experts. This corner will give you an insider’s view on the new features around the corner, useful tips, and tricks and all the techie gossip at ResellerBytes!

For the first installment of the series, we’re tackling a very common aspect of most hosting queries – Extensions that are available on Servers. As many of you may know, on IIS systems it is not always possible to figure out what libraries are supported, whereas it is much simpler on machines running Apache.
(Disclaimer: Being a Linux fanboy, this post might display a little bit of favoritism to the Linux platform)

Therefore, today we’re going to tell you a little bit about how one can check if IonCube Loader is installed on a Linux Server using PHP.

Ioncube Loader is a handy extension when you want to protect files with PHP encoding, encryption, obfuscation and licensing capabilities. If you have a proprietary software that you distribute or you simply wish to encode your script, you should use IonCube. There are other methods to encode PHP scripts, but IonCube is by far the most secure. You can easily figure out if IonCube is running by looking at the information from PHP info. To check this you need to create a PHP file with the content as:

<?php phpinfo(); ?>

Here, you will see a Zend Engine badge with the version for IonCube loader (the version on our servers is v3.3.7).

However, this only gives you very basic information on the IonCube version running. If you need more information on IonCube, you can use the sample PHP script attached below. Use an FTP client to upload the file “ioncube_advance_tester.php” to root directory of the website. Depending on your hosting package, it may be named “public_html” or “web”.

This script will output diagnostic results and give you information on getting server-side parameters. You can use this script to check other parameters.

The file uses the ioncube_loader_version_array() function to get a list of all config parameters into an array. We then iterate through this array to echo results. It is a very simple and straightforward script. Apart from checking whether IonCube is installed, the script also checks if other server settings are correct.

We have created functions for the Introduction and More Information sections. This is only to exhibit how everyone should code using PHP 5. You can take this script and run it on any Apache server; however, this script does not support IIS.

You can download this file from here and save it as a .php file. You can perform this check on any of Linux hosting infrastructure may it be shared hosting, reseller hosting, dedicated servers or VPS.

Hope this was an informative read. Let us know what you think!