How to Enable JSON and cURL in PHP on Joyent Shared Servers

After starting at Twilio, I wanted to get a bunch of development environments set up where it would be easy to hack around with the API and put together demos quickly. One of my hosts is Joyent, whom I love. I’ve been using them since they were TextDrive and have never had any problems that weren’t self-inflicted. I have about a dozen domains set-up on their shared hosting service and got to work downloading the Twilio PHP helper library and creating a simple app to use Twilio’s REST API to send a text message.

This is the point at which my productivity came to a screeching halt and I confronted the dreaded white screen of death. PHP was (silently) telling me that something was wrong. In order to get back on track, I needed to configure PHP to show the errors it was encountering. Luckily, this was pretty simple. I just logged-in to my host and tracked down the PHP initialization file for the domain I was working with.

[platt:~] crabasa$ cd domains/rabasa.com
[platt:~/domains/rabasa.com] crabasa$ vi etc/php5/php.ini

Then I looked for the property that control the display of errors and made sure it was set to “On”:

display_errors = On

Awesome, now it’s time to hit “reload” and see what’s going on. PHP is quick to tell me:

Fatal error: Call to undefined function curl_init() in /users/home/crabasa/software/twilio-php/Services/Twilio/TinyHttp.php on line 61

It seems that the PHP helper library has dependencies, in this case cURL. The cURL module is neccessary to make the HTTP calls to the Twilio REST API. This is an easy fix, I just need to edit my php.ini and un-comment the line that includes the cURL extension:

extension=curl.so

Woo hoo! I’m home free, right? Wrong:

Fatal error: Call to undefined function json_decode() in /users/home/crabasa/software/twilio-php/Services/Twilio.php on line 148

Looks like there’s another dependency, this time on JSON. The JSON module allows us to deserialize the JSON data we get back from the API. Let’s include the JSON extension as well:

extension=json.so

That’s it! With a couple of tweaks I am now ready to start hitting web service APIs using PHP. W00t!