Status: Deprecated

This article covers a version of Ubuntu that is no longer supported. If you are currently operate a server running Ubuntu 12.04, we highly recommend upgrading or migrating to a supported version of Ubuntu:

• Upgrade to Ubuntu 14.04.
• Upgrade from Ubuntu 14.04 to Ubuntu 16.04
• Migrate the server data to a supported version

Reason: Ubuntu 12.04 reached end of life (EOL) on April 28, 2017 and no longer receives security patches or updates. This guide is no longer maintained.

See Instead:
This guide might still be useful as a reference, but may not work on other Ubuntu releases. If available, we strongly recommend using a guide written for the version of Ubuntu you are using. You can use the search functionality at the top of the page to find a more recent version.

Note: This article has been updated for Ubuntu 16.04.

IonCube is a PHP module extension that loads encrypted PHP files and speeds up webpages that are being displayed.

It is often required for a lot of PHP-based applications.

IonCube on 32-bit systems

This section is for PHP installed on a 32-bit system (for example: spinning up LAMP on Ubuntu 12.04 from Applications).

If you don't have a LAMP stack on your droplet, you can spin up a LAMP stack from our Applications:

First, you will need to download and extract the IonCube Loader PHP modules.

wget http://downloads3.ioncube.com/loader_downloads/ioncube_loaders_lin_x86.tar.gz
tar xvfz ioncube_loaders_lin_x86.tar.gz

Then, you will have to copy the appropriate module to the PHP modules folder. To find that folder's path, run the following command

php -i | grep extension_dir

You will get the following output:

extension_dir => /usr/lib/php5/20090626+lfs => /usr/lib/php5/20090626+lfs

Now you should copy over the module to your PHP modules folder:

PHP_VERSION=$(php -r "echo PHP_MAJOR_VERSION.'.'.PHP_MINOR_VERSION;")
sudo cp "ioncube/ioncube_loader_lin_${PHP_VERSION}.so" /usr/lib/php5/20090626+lfs/

You would then have to restart Apache2 or php5-fpm (if you're using nginx) for the module to be loaded:

service apache2 restart
service php5-fpm restart

To ensure that the module was correctly installed, create a file called test.php in /var/www with the following content:

<?php
echo var_export(extension_loaded('ionCube Loader') ,true);

Once you have done that, navigate to http://your-droplets-ip-address/test.php. It should output "true".

IonCube on 64-bit systems

If you have installed your own LAMP stack on a 64-bit Linux, you would need to download a 64 bit package:

wget http://downloads3.ioncube.com/loader_downloads/ioncube_loaders_lin_x86-64.tar.gz
tar xvfz ioncube_loaders_lin_x86-64.tar.gz

You should proceed with same steps as outlined above.

And you are all done!