Mini HOWTO: Interbase/Firebird PHP extension on Zend Server CE for Mac OS X

A bit time ago I was desperately looking for running Firebird/Interbase PHP extension on Zend Server Community Edition for Mac OS X Snow Leopard, but googling around didn’t bring any helpful results. So, after a few hours spent, I managed to create one by myself. Here we go:

1. If you have a previous version of Firebird installed, get rid of it with the following shell script (unless you actually use this installation!) – you need to become superuser first:

   #!/bin/sh
   echo "Clean Services"
   echo "Clean User"
   dscl localhost -delete /Local/Default/Users/firebird
   echo "Clean Group"
   dscl localhost -delete /Local/Default/Groups/firebird
   if [ -f "/Library/StartupItems/Firebird" ]; then
       echo "Remove SuperServer StartupItem"
       rm -fr /Library/StartupItems/Firebird
   fi
   if [ -f "/Library/LaunchDaemons/org.firebird.gds.plist" ]; then
       echo "Remove Launchd"
       launchctl unload /Library/LaunchDaemons/org.firebird.gds.plist
       rm /Library/LaunchDaemons/org.firebird.gds.plist
   fi
   echo "Remove Framework"
   rm -fr /Library/Frameworks/Firebird.framework
   echo "Remove Receipt"
   rm -fr /Library/Receipts/Firebird*.pkg

2. Go to Firebird download site, grab a Intel x86 for MacOSX 10.4+, 32-bit Classic version package, compressed (2.1.3 was the current version at the time of writing). There’s no mistake here: 32-bit package is mandatory, because Zend Server CE builds are 32-bit!
3. Unpack .zip and install Firebird RDBMS. Now, from Terminal, still as root:

   cd /Library/Frameworks/Firebird.framework/
   ln -s Libraries lib
   ln -s Headers include

4. Grab and unpack PHP 5.3.2 Zend Server CE sources (to extract a .deb file you will need some smart program; I used BetterZip). Extract contents of the newly created data.tar.gz file and copy a php-source directory to a /usr/local/zend/share/.
5. From Terminal:

   cd /usr/local/zend/share/php-source/php-5.3.2/ext/interbase
   phpize

6. Now we need to run some ugly, magic mumbo-jumbo from command line:

   ./configure --with-php-config=/usr/local/zend/bin/php-config --with-interbase=/Library/Frameworks/Firebird.framework MACOSX_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET=10.6 CFLAGS="-arch i386 -g -Os -pipe -no-cpp-precomp" CCFLAGS="-arch i386 -g -Os -pipe" CXXFLAGS="-arch i386 -g -Os -pipe" LDFLAGS="-arch i386 -bind_at_load"
   make
   make install

7. Restart Zend Server.

Done! Good luck 🙂