How to Install Ming Support for PHP in Linux

When you need to work with Flash in PHP, you have to install Ming. Ming is an open source library that allows you to deal with flash from command line. We will use it for our PHP scripts.

First of all, we need to download the library from Sourceforge. Link that you can find on php.net leads to Wiki page and you cannot find the link there. I’ve found this link on Google and here it is: Ming.

I’ve used ming-0.4.0-beta5 and it went well after some time. I will tell you how to install it fast and easy, as usual.

We need to untar the archive downloaded with tar -xzvf . Then – usual Linux commands:
./configure
make
make install

Then we need to add ming support to PHP. Though PHP 5.2.5 has ming library in the archive, it refused to install telling me about an error with one swf function.

You need to copy all files from php_ext folder of ming to your untarred php installation package, replacing existing files. Then we need to recompile PHP for ming support. We need to add –with-ming to configure line. PHP configuration also has nothing special.

./configure … –with-ming
make clean
make
make install

Then you need to restart Apache. If everything went OK, you should see something like this in phpinfo() output:

You are now welcome to create your Flash movies using ming functions in PHP. Have fun!