One web developer contacted us and requested us to install PDFlib on their cPanel dedicated server which has PHP 5. As you must be knowing that PDFlib is not supported in the current cPanel easyapache, and especially with PHP 5 so we installed PDFlib Lite manually for him. Here is how we had installed it for them:

Download the pacakge, their official site is www.pdflib.com

root@server# wget http://www.pdflib.com/binaries/PDFlib/703/PDFlib-Lite-7.0.3.tar.gz
root@server#  tar xvzf PDFlib-Lite-7.0.3.tar.gz
root@server#  cd PDFlib-Lite-7.0.3
root@server#  ./configure --prefix=$HOME/usr --without-java
root@server#  make
root@server#  make install

Once this is done, we built PDFlib DSO by the below commands:

root@server#  cd ~/tmp
root@server#  pecl download pdflib
root@server#  tar xvzf pdflib-*.tgz
root@server#  cd pdflib-*
root@server#  phpize
root@server#  ./configure --with-pdflib=$HOME/usr
root@server#  make
root@server#  make test

Then, copied the PDFlib extensions to a seperate directory:

root@server#  cd ~
root@server#  mkdir extensions
root@server#  cp ~/tmp/pdflib-*/modules/pdf.so ~/extensions

Added the extensions in the php.ini using the below steps:

root@server#   php -i | grep php.ini
Configuration File (php.ini) Path => /usr/local/lib
Loaded Configuration File => /usr/local/lib/php.ini

Add the below line in php.ini

root@server#  nano /usr/local/lib/php.ini

extension_dir = "/root/extensions"
extension = "pdf.so"

Save php.ini file
Create a test PHP file under your domain to check if it works, below is the test code:


<?php

try {
$p = new PDFlib();

/*  open new PDF file; insert a file name to create the PDF on disk */
if ($p->begin_document(“”, “”) == 0) {
die(“Error: ” . $p->get_errmsg());
}

$p->set_info(“Creator”, “hello.php”);
$p->set_info(“Author”, “Rainer Schaaf”);
$p->set_info(“Title”, “Hello world (PHP)!”);

$p->begin_page_ext(595, 842, “”);

$font = $p->load_font(“Helvetica-Bold”, “winansi”, “”);

$p->setfont($font, 24.0);
$p->set_text_pos(50, 700);
$p->show(“Hello world!”);
$p->continue_text(“(says PHP)”);
$p->end_page_ext(“”);

$p->end_document(“”);

$buf = $p->get_buffer();
$len = strlen($buf);

header(“Content-type: application/pdf”);
header(“Content-Length: $len”);
header(“Content-Disposition: inline; filename=hello.pdf”);
print $buf;
}
catch (PDFlibException $e) {
die(“PDFlib exception occurred in hello sample:\n” .
“[" . $e->get_errnum() . "] ” . $e->get_apiname() . “: ” .
$e->get_errmsg() . “\n”);
}
catch (Exception $e) {
die($e);
}
$p = 0;
?>

You need to get the below output in PDF format within your browser.

Hello world!
(Says PHP)

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