PHP Session support

[PSS]

Does Vbulletin require session support compiled to php?

[Steve Machol]

Can you provide an example of what that looks like in phpinfo?

[PSS]

in phpinfo() you get "Session support: enabled" under section "session" when you compile without --disable-session

http://us.php.net/session

I just want to remove all unneeded stuff from php binary (do not need session on my other software).

I have impression that Vb stores sessions in database or memcached so php session functions are not used?

[Steve Machol]

I don't ever recall ever running into a server that had that disabled (it's not here or on my server.) My guess is that you will need it enabled. Howeveer the best way to know for sure is to try it both ways.

[PSS]

Well, some day it would be a great to have a list of REQUIRED php features. In another words, a way to know what is minimal php configuration to run vbulletin - testing this with live site is not what I would do right now - I thought developers would have a list ready. There are lots of functions in php that are compiled by default, but have a switch to disable them from compilation.

[Wayne Luke]

vBulletin does not require PHP Session Support. It uses its own session support since we had sessions before PHP did.

A basic installation with MySQL support is the minimum that is required to run vBulletin. For full features you should include GD and CURL support.

This is the PHP configure string we use for the vBulletin servers running PHP 5.1.x and Apache 2.2.x:

./configure \
 --prefix=/usr/local/php \
 --with-config-file-path=/usr/local/php \
 --with-mysql=/usr \
 --with-mysqli=/usr/bin/mysql_config \
 --with-exif-dir=/usr \
 --with-jpeg-dir=/usr \
 --with-tiff-dir=/usr \
 --with-png-dir=/usr \
 --with-freetype-dir=/usr \
 --with-ttf=/usr \
 --with-openssl \
 --with-zlib \
 --with-gd \
 --with-iconv \
 --with-ldap \
 --enable-ftp \
 --enable-sockets \
 --enable-sysvsem \
 --enable-sysvshm \
 --enable-rpath \
 --enable-bcmath \
 --enable-memory-limit \
 --with-apxs2=/usr/local/apache/bin/apxs

It's a pretty good all-purpose PHP configure string and supports everything that vBulletin needs, though it may need minor modification to work with other servers with libraries in different places etc.