Compiling PHP with *BSD

Hi all. This is a tough post to categorize, since it is both an OS and a language question.

I currently am running PHP 4.3 as an Apache DSO module, but also need the command line version (CLI) of PHP so I can kick off processes behind my Web site with CRON.

I have downloaded the source code for php 4.3.1 and understand the basics of {./config} and {make install} to build the binary executables. What I really need to understand is what the plethora of "--enable" and "--with" mean and what these do? I can get the list of options in the configure executable by passing a help parameter {./configure --help}, but the puny descriptions don't help me to understand them.

There are dozens of items such as:

...
--with-libedit[=DIR] Include libedit readline replacement (CLI/CGI only).
--with-readline[=DIR] Include readline support (CLI/CGI only).
--with-recode[=DIR] Include recode support.
--disable-session Disable session support
--with-mm[=DIR] Include mm support for session storage
--enable-shmop Enable shmop support
--with-snmp[=DIR] Include SNMP support.
--enable-ucd-snmp-hack Enable UCD SNMP hack
...
etc...

But the one-liner descriptions don't help me understand what these are? Where can I find documentation on all these configuration options, how to select them, and where to get the code for them (if the libraries or binaries are not already on my Mac OSX darwin system)?

Thanks for the help.

Don't know if you're still after help on this one, but when I was working on a similar issue on FreeBSD and wanted to know what the various options to mod_php4's build process were I just ran a search on the .chm version of the PHP manual for each with-* option.

For example I'd never come across 'recode' before with reference to PHP4 - a quick search in the .chm PHP manual told me it was to do with language char sets (iirc), so I left it well alone.

Also - I've never used Darwin but heard good things about it. Is the ports system similar to FreeBSD (using make under /usr/ports to install ports)? If so the PHP4 port has recently undergone a revamp on FreeBSD so doing what you're trying to do is actually very straight forward.

I'm doing something very similar to you I think right now - installing mod_php4 to handle web cgi requests from a web control panel and the php CLI to run a backend PHP daemon to handle the updates that the control panel cgi generates.

To set this up I did something like:

cd /usr/ports/www/mod_php4; make install (chose the options I needed for mod_php4)

and then

cd /usr/ports/lang/php4-cli; make install (chose the options I needed for php CLI)

which worked a treat. Much simpler than it used to be.

EDIT: The above does _not_ work, the cleanest way I've found to run mod_php4 with one set of options and the php cli with another is to build/install the cli php binary FROM SOURCE to a distinct location like /usr/local/php-cli. This isn't such a kludge since you only have to modify the shebang line in cli scripts to read #!/usr/local/php-cli/bin/php.

If you still haven't got it running why not cheat a bit and install a readymade compile.
http://www.somebodydial911.com/archives/001059.php