Installing SSH2 extension for PHP on Centos 6

Installing the SSH2 PHP extension on CentOS is actually pretty simple. 


Although it isn’t available as a straight yum install, it boils down to a few short steps.


Firstly, we’re going to install the dependencies:

yum install gcc php-devel php-pear libssh2 libssh2-devel

These will allow us to build the SSH2 extension using pecl.

pecl install -f ssh2

After running that command, it should stop at a line like:

WARNING: channel "pecl.php.net" has updated its protocols, use "pecl channel-update pecl.php.net" to update
downloading ssh2-0.11.3.tgz ...
Starting to download ssh2-0.11.3.tgz (23,062 bytes)
........done: 23,062 bytes
5 source files, building
running: phpize
Configuring for:
PHP Api Version:         20090626
Zend Module Api No:      20090626
Zend Extension Api No:   220090626
libssh2 prefix? [autodetect] : 

All you have to do is hit Enter and it should detect the proper path. 


Once the install is completed, you just have to tell PHP to load the extension when it boots.

touch /etc/php.d/ssh2.ini
echo extension=ssh2.so > /etc/php.d/ssh2.ini

Now restart your webserver and test to see if the changes took effect.

/etc/init.d/lighttpd restart
php -m | grep ssh2

You should get a line returned with ‘ssh2′.