Installing PHP-GTK Under Unix

Debian users can now download a PHP-GTK binary from http://www.debian.org/.

PHP GTK depends on a number of packages, which need to be installed before starting the PHP-GTK installation:

PHP version 4.3.2 or later
The GTK+ libraries, available from http://www.gtk.org/download/, or you can use the packaged versions for your system, e.g. gtk and gtk-devel
libtool, automake and autoconf. The combination of libtool 1.4.2, automake 1.4 and autoconf 2.13 is known to work; mileage may vary with other version combinations.
For the optional extras, download GtkHTML libraries, GtkScintilla libraries and Gdk-Pixbuf libraries. Again, these may be available packaged on your system, just ensure that you also install the development package. GtkHTML, notably, has a number of sub-dependencies, e.g. GAL, that can also be obtained from the Gnome ftp site.

We suggest you get the latest source from http://gtk.php.net/ or from anonymous CVS http://www.php.net/anoncvs.php.

Run the ./buildconf script that is inside the distribution. This will set up the necessary files and create the configure script. Next, run ./configure. This will check that you have a correct version of GTK+ 1.2.x (1.2.6 or above, available from http://www.gtk.org/download/) and other files required for compilation, and will then create the needed Makefiles.

./configure can also be used to build the extra widgets, e.g. ./configure --enable-scintilla --enable-gtkhtml. To list all the available options use ./configure --help. Remember that each extra widget may have a number of dependencies that need to be available for the build to be successful.

Finally, run make to compile the extension. Some source files are generated from .defs files by the code generator. If you see messages like "Could not write...", it means that the listed GTK+ objects or features are not yet supported. If the compilation is successful, run make install to install the extension into your default PHP extension directory (usually /usr/local/lib/php/extensions).

Troubleshooting: common problems from ./configure or make

./ltconfig: ltconfig : No such file or directory, configure: error: libtool configure failed is caused by not having one of libtool, automake or autoconf installed.
./aclocal.m4:813: error: m4_defn: undefined: _m4_divert_diversion is caused by an incompatible version of autoconf, see the recommended versions above.
php_gtk+.c:33: parse error before `TSRMLS_DC' is caused by either an old version of php being found by the build system or trying to build php-gtk with an old version of PHP - please upgrade to PHP version 4.3.2 to fix this.
gen_gtk.c:1: parse error before '<' is caused by an error occurring in the generator. Usually this error is resolved by adding the line ini_set("memory_limit", "32M"); to the first line of generator/generator.php. You will need to remove all the gen_* files from all directories after changing this.
checking for gnome-config... Unknown library `gtkhtml' (from ./configure) is due to an old or unavailable development header file - if you installed by rpm or a similar package system you will need the -devel packages
Unable to find -lgal or similar message is caused by a missing gal-devel or similar library. Usually this will be a sub dependancy of some of the more complex widgets, like gtkhtml.

To test the extension, try running the example scripts in the test/ directory. These also provide demonstrations of some of the ways in which PHP-GTK and its extensions can be used.