Unfortunately the informix extension has been moved to PECL but has no maintainer.
http://devzone.zend.com/node/view/id/1621#Heading11
In practic terms, it has been moved but is not available in PECL yet.
It's sad. I have a big client who uses this extension for more than 6 years and now has to change a code base of 500,000 lines of code or install an old version of PHP in the new server. They recently bought a redundant, double cpu, 8 gb ram, scsi disk server and will not be happy to run old versions of software with unmaintained extensions.
One very frustrating experience with interfacing
Informix and unixODBC (on RHEL4 - PHP 5.20)
was the constant Informix error:
[SQLSTATE=IX 001 SQLCODE=-1829]
Unable to load locale categories
& the non existant handles from unixODBC calls.
This is an issue of the environment being set correctly
which I thought was - phpinfo() reported that the apache
environment was correct <_server=> I even went as far as
to Put/Setenv in httpd.conf.
The hint is in the php 'environment' block
- it did not contain the env strings.
The fix was to insert the environment strings in the httpd
start-up script (/etc/init.d/httpd) which pushed the
environment correctly when the server starts up.
Hope to save someone else the hours....
Installation on RedHat Fedore Core (or in that matter any Linux OS which has a version of glibc of 2.3.* ~or above~) will need to have the latest Informix CSDK (downloadable from IBM). 2.90.UC1.LINUX at the time of this post.
http://www-306.ibm.com/software/data/informix/tools/connect/
I was unable to make PHP with v2.80 of the csdk (as it complained about mktemp being dangerous and how ctype was undefined. After downloading csdk 2.90, I was able to make PHP with no problems at all. (--with-informix).
There goes 2 days of my life!
Feel free to drop me an email at ian_at_devtonic_dot_com if you have any questions.
I just wrote a mini-HOWTO about adding Informix support to mod_php running on a Gentoo Linux server (x86). I wanted to post it here but it was too long. You can find it on http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=245249 (just in case for some reason they change the thread number, the title is "HOWTO: PHP Informix client support").
add the following to /etc/profile (right before unset i (adjust to your needs)
export INFORMIXDIR=/opt/informix
export ODBCINI=/usr/local/etc/odbc.ini
export INFORMIXSERVER=m_srv
then add the following to your httpd.conf
PassEnv INFORMIXDIR
PassEnv ODBCINI
PassEnv INFORMIXSERVER
(or you can use SetEnv SetEnv INFORMIXDIR /opt/informix etc.)
I upgraded to csdk-2.70.UC3-1 and got the following error when trying to start apache:
Syntax error on line 205 of /usr/local/apache/conf/httpd.conf:
Cannot load /usr/local/apache/libexec/libphp4.so into server: /opt/informix/lib/esql/libifgen.so: undefined symbol: stat
/usr/local/apache/bin/apachectl start: httpd could not be started
This machine has glibc 2.3.5
The following fixed the problem for me (surely there's a better fix) but i'm not sure how it might affect other programs linked to libifgen
mkdir /tmp/ifx
cd /tmp/ifx
ar x $INFORMIXDIR/lib/esql/libifgen.a
gcc -shared -o libifgen.so *.o
cp libifgen.so $INFORMIXDIR/lib/esql
I have compile php-4.0.6 with informix support (dynamic) and when I try to
start apache, it gives me this error message:
Syntax error on line 246 of /etc/httpd/httpd.conf:
Cannot load /usr/lib/apache/libphp4.so into server: /home/informix7/lib/esql/lib
ifgen.so: undefined symbol: stat
/usr/sbin/apachectl start: httpd could not be started
If you are tring to access an Informix Online 5.x server over the
network (ie from a webserver) using PHP, be aware that Online
doesn't support network communications as standard unlike later versions.
You need the Informix product 'I-Star' on your Online server.
This will allow your webserver with the informix client SDK
installed to communicate natively (ESQL).
Thanks go to Mario @ PRS for this info.
An intermittent SQL error -25580 is caused by using the wrong glibc version in Linux.
I have this working correctly in Linux (x86) with Informix Client SDK for 2.70UC-1 for Linux, with glibc 2.1.3.
Originally I had glibc 2.1.1 (Red Hat 6), which gave the intermittent error, but upgrading glibc fixed it.
The Informix Client SDKs can be downloaded from www.informix.com (you need to own an Informix database to log on), and glibc is at ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/glibc .
There's also a FreeBSD version of the client libraries that'll work with PHP. It's not available for download from their website, but you can request a copy (cd or electronic delivery) by calling Informix Customer Support at 1-800-274-8184 option 3.
Some customer service reps know more about alternative operating systems than others, so you may have to do a bit of educating before they can locate the product in their database, but it's definitely there.
My e-mail confirmation referred to it as "Orderable Part Number 100-15871-204057-1", although that number may be specific to the electronically-delivered edition.
Verify with phpinfo() that you have informix module compiled in php.
Also verify that env vars INFORMIXDIR, INFORMIXSERVER, LD_LIBRARY_PATH are set, and that PATH have a route to your informix subdir.