{"id":455218,"date":"2025-04-09T03:00:05","date_gmt":"2025-04-09T03:00:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/savepearlharbor.com\/?p=455218"},"modified":"-0001-11-30T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"-0001-11-29T21:00:00","slug":"","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/savepearlharbor.com\/?p=455218","title":{"rendered":"Building Debian Packages for PHP Extensions<\/span>"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Disclaimer:<\/em><\/strong> Initially, this document was intended for our internal documentation repository, but the topic turned out to be not-so-internal and possibly interesting to the broader community. So here we are\u2014publishing the doc, and even the code repositories landed on our <\/em>GitHub<\/em><\/a>. That\u2019s how it goes.<\/em><\/p>\n

A small note: this article omits some important aspects of a Debian Maintainer\u2019s responsibilities, such as proper release naming, lintian compliance, code signing, and generally doing everything by the book to publish a package publicly according to strict Debian guidelines. This is an internal build. But everything is in your hands. If you’re a bearded Linux maintainer, this may all seem painfully na\u00efve to you\u2014please try not to burst out laughing.<\/em><\/p>\n

We use PHP extensively in our projects\u2014for better or worse, trendy or outdated, it works, doesn\u2019t ask for much, and gets the job done. Also, all this runs in stateful containers within a Debian-like OS environment (in our case, Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, though the exact distro isn\u2019t critical).<\/p>\n

The problem:<\/strong> Historically, we\u2019ve relied on some fairly obscure PHP extensions\u2014poorly maintained, barely supported by their authors, and completely absent from standard Debian package sources. We follow the principle of \u201cdo it right or don\u2019t do it at all,\u201d so Slackware-style<\/abbr> binary installs outside package managers are discouraged. Hence, we need to build proper .deb packages for PHP extensions without breaking compatibility with the surrounding environment.<\/p>\n

The specific PHP extensions in question\u2014where this all started\u2014are Blitz<\/a> (by Alexey Rybak<\/a>) and php-rdkafka<\/a> (by Arnaud Le Blanc<\/a>). They have similar issues, though Blitz’s are more severe: no packages in standard repos, last release was ages ago, and since then, the author and community have added a bunch of useful patches\u2014some of which fix compatibility issues with newer PHP versions that didn\u2019t exist when the last release was made. In short: no packages, outdated releases, and valuable patches in HEAD.<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s go get our homebrew Debian Package Maintainer<\/abbr> badge.<\/p>\n

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Hint: some of the environment files can be generated automatically or created manually\u2014but that\u2019s not always convenient. Sometimes it\u2019s easier to copy from an existing working solution, and there\u2019s nothing wrong with that.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

What does a typical PHP extension build process look like?<\/h4>\n