hide your php source code (expired)

I’m a big fan of the open source philosophy but sometimes it’s useful to have an unreadable binary source code.
In this posting i will show you how to use and how to install bcompiler to encode your scripts in phpbytecode, enabling you to protect the source code.

First we need a source file (source.php) and convert it with make_bytecode.php to a byte code file (crypt.php).

The source.php is an example php file you can add your own code here.

<?php
if ($_GET['foo'] == “bar”) {
echo “bar”;
} else {
echo “foo”;
}
?>

make_bytecode.php converts the source.php to crypt.php. Make sure that crypt.php is writeable.

<?php
$f = fopen(”crypt.php”, “w”);
bcompiler_write_header($f);
bcompiler_write_file($f, “source.php”);
bcompiler_write_footer($f);
?>

After executing make_bytecode.php in your browser or command line crypt.php should be generated.

As you can see in the picture below the source code of crypt.php isn’t readable but you can execute the php code like any other php file.

Install:

The package and information you can find here:
http://pecl.php.net/package/bcompiler
I installed bcompiler on Debian Etch, but it should work on any Linux systems and on windows too.

If not installed you have to install the php-developer package (php4 or php5):
sudo aptitude install php5-dev

I also had to install the libbz2-dev, to prevent the error message “configure: error: Please reinstall the BZip2 distribution” from the pecl installer.
sudo aptitude install libbz2-dev

After that I installed bcompiler version 0.8 over the pecl installer:
sudo pecl install channel://pecl.php.net/bcompiler-0.8

Make sure that the installer return this line at the end “install ok: channel://pear.php.net/bcompiler-0.8″.
If not check the error messages and try to fix it!

Add extension=bcompiler.so to your php.ini