Knowledge Base Overview

You can download the Zend Guard Loader module for free from Zend's Download Page but be careful to select the correct version. In this document I'll tell what you have to watch out for.

Auto select Operating System

Zend's website will detect your current Operating System and open the corresponding tab for you. For instance: When you visit from a Windows desktop you will get the Windows tab, from an Android smartphone it shows the Linux tab and guess what with the iPod, the tab for Mac OS X.

So, watch out and choose wisely!

Manually select correct tab

Unfortunately the design and the text within the tabs isn't very helpful or distinct in telling what operating system and versions you are looking at. If you work from a Windows system but need the Linux module for CentOS make sure you clicked the Linux tab.

Within each tab you have versions for Zend Guard (the encoding application) followed by the two different modules Zend Optimizer and Zend Guard Loader. You will need one of these modules for decoding the encoded pages.

Optimizer versus Guard Loader

If you have PHP 5.2 or earlier you will need Zend Optimizer whereas the Guard Loader must be used for PHP 5.3; we don't know yet what the future holds for 5.4.

If you don't know what PHP version is on your system simply run php -v command. It'll tell you the version on the first line.

32-bit versus 64-bit

Now, for Zend Guard Loader on Linux you have two options, a 32-bit version and a 64-bit version. It is important that you install the correct version and while the download (tar.gz) packages have distinct names the filename for the actual module itself ZendGuardLoader.so is the same for both versions.

In case you don't know what processor your Linux system has you can run the following command

[root@centos ~]# uname -p

x86-64  // this would be a 64-bit system

Download on the command line

If you follow this for an installation where you work remotely with ssh/PuTTY and wonder how to download on the command line in Linux here is a hint for how to download the file. If you already know you can skip ahead, of course.

There is a handy little utility called wget for retrieving files with HTTP or FTP protocols. Once you have the correct link name from above you can paste it to the wget command and download the file from Zend directly to your Linux box. Extract the tar.gz and you should be ready for the next steps.

If you don't have wget yet and use CentOS Linux you can find and install it with yum.

When you have your download and the module extracted it is time for the installation.

Install the module

For installing the Zend Guard Loader module I wrote another document. The webpage Zend Guard Loader on CentOS will tell you how to install this module primarily on Linux but the procedures for Windows are basically very similar.