Embeder Tutorial

All you need is:

1. The scripts below, cut’n paste them, all in the same directory.
2. php5ts.dll installed somewhere in your path (or at least in the current directory).
3. php_win32std.dll installed somewhere in your PHP extension path (see php-embed.ini in the embeder zip).
4. and of course embeder.exe (put embeder.exe and php-embed.ini in the same directory than your php5ts.dll)

@echo off
embeder.exe new myapp
embeder.exe main myapp main.php
embeder.exe add myapp include.inc

• The first line create a brand new exe file called myapp.exe
• The second includes main.php and specify that it’s the main script (the one to start with).
• The third line include a PHP file needed by main.php.

<? function hello() { echo "Hello people !"; } ?>

<?
function _f($file) { return defined('EMBEDED')?'res:///PHP/'.md5($file):$file; }
 
include _f('include.inc');
hello();
?>

As you noticed the included file is wrapped by the _f function. This function returns the correct filename according to the EMBEDED constant which is automatically defined when your script is embedded in the exe.

You can then run make.bat to create the executable file and you’re ready to run the exe.

If that fail it’s probably because the php-embed.ini is not in (in the correct order):

• the same directory than your exe
• the same directory than php5ts.dll

If you use a GUI you probably want to get rid of the DOS box, there’s currently no direct support for that in embeder but I’ve also released a port of Perl's exetype that has the abilty change the ‘type’ of an exe, in our case from CONSOLE (the default exe type created by embeder) to WINDOWS (console-less).

Currently the only way to install the PHP binaries is to use the PHP installer.

I dream about something like a PHP redistribuable that will install PHP and the usefull extensions used in client-side scripting.