How to install PHP-GTK in Ubuntu 7.10

Alright, let's get down to business.

Setup

First thing we're going to do, if you haven't already at sometime or another, is install the build essentials. We can do this by opening a terminal (Applications->Accessories->Terminal) and typing

sudo apt-get install build-essential

Next, we need to install the packages required to use GTK (and cvs, assuming you do not have it):

sudo apt-get install php5-cli php5-dev php5-gd libgtk2.0-dev libglade2-dev cvs

Now we're ready to grab the files we need. Let's go ahead and connect to the repository with cvs:

cvs -d :pserver:cvsread@cvs.php.net:/repository login

It will ask you for a password, just press enter. Now we'll checkout the files with cvs:

cvs -d :pserver:cvsread@cvs.php.net:/repository co php-gtk

Once that's completed, we can switch to the php-gtk directory, using

cd /home/username/php-gtk

Making sure to replace 'username' with your username, cd into it's directory. We're finally ready. Let's build php-gtk.

Building and Installing

First buildconf,

./buildconf

Once that finishes, we can configure...

./configure

And make...

make

And lastly, make and install it.

sudo make install

Now we have php-gtk and everything we need installed, we need to include the PHP-GTK extension in our php.ini, using $anyeditor. I happen to like gedit.

sudo gedit /etc/php5/cli/php.ini

About halfway down (or by searching/grepping for 'Extensions',) you can include the extension by using:

extension=php_gtk2.so

Once that's saved, we can restart apache and test out php-gtk. Let's go ahead and restart apache...

sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

Testing

And once apache is restarted, we can see if PHP-GTK is ready using

php -m | grep php-gtk

As long as you get the confirmation-

php-gtk

You're ready to start writing client side desktop applications. You can check out the PHP-GTK Documentation or tutorials for some ideas on how to use it. Sometime in the near future, I'll be putting up some tutorials for PHP-GTK with some demos. Have an idea for a fun demo, or advice on using PHP-GTK? Leave a comment, I appreciate them all.