Lukáš Mešťan

Software engineer with a background in full-stack Web development & Open Source Enthusiast.


How to install libsodium in php7

- 2 mins
php7 tutorial

The Sodium crypto library (libsodium) is a modern, easy-to-use software library for encryption, decryption, signatures, password hashing and more. It is a portable, cross-compilable, installable, packageable fork of NaCl, with a compatible API, and an extended API to improve usability even further.

Its goal is to provide all of the core operations needed to build higher-level cryptographic tools.

Sodium supports a variety of compilers and operating systems, including Windows (with MinGW or Visual Studio, x86 and x64), iOS and Android.

To install this extension on PHP 7.1, run the following commands as your server’s root user:

Verify php and pecl version

php -v
pecl version

If you don’t have the PECL package manager installed on your system, make sure you do that first. There are guides for installing PECL available on the Internet for virtually every operating system that PHP supports.

If your php isn’t 7.1 then use /usr/bin/php7.1 instead php command.

Install libsodium extension

PECL Libsodium refers to the PHP extension available as a PECL package that exposes the libsodium API for PHP developers.

Version 7.2.0 and newer of the PHP programming language includes the Sodium extension (referred to as ext/sodium) as a core cryptography library. Version 2 of the PHP extension in PECL is compatible with ext/sodium in PHP 7.2.

sudo pecl install -f libsodium

On some Linux distributions such as Debian, you may have to install PECL (php-pear), the PHP development package (php-dev) and a compiler (build-essential) prior to running this command.

After success installing libsodium trought pecl, you should add sodium.so extension to php.ini.

sudo echo "extension = sodium.so" > /etc/php/7.1/mods-available/sodium.ini
sudo phpenmod sodium

You might be able to achieve this result by running phpenmod sodium or php5enmod sodium, depending on which webserver you use. Make sure you restart your webserver after installing ext/sodium.

Verify that the extension was installed

After installing both the library and the PHP extension, make a quick test php script to verify that you have the correct version of libsodium installed.

<?php
var_dump([
    SODIUM_LIBRARY_MAJOR_VERSION,
    SODIUM_LIBRARY_MINOR_VERSION,
    SODIUM_LIBRARY_VERSION
]);

Or you can verify via terminal:

php -i | grep "sodium"

The output will look like this:

/etc/php/7.1/cli/conf.d/ext-libsodium.ini,
libsodium
libsodium support => enabled
libsodium compiled version => 2.0.10

Can We Use Libsodium on Older PHP and/or If We Cannot Install PHP Extensions?

You’re looking for sodium_compat, which supports PHP 5.2 through 7.2, but doesn’t support all of libsodium’s features. In particular, it provides no password hashing algorithms.

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