PHP Extensions and ionCube

CorePanel ships a fixed set of PHP versions and extensions, declared by the corepanel-php package. It covers what a normal PHP site needs, and it is the same set on every CorePanel server — see Server Maintenance for how that package reaches your host.

Some software needs more than that set. The common case is commercially encoded PHP: WHMCS, licensing systems and many paid scripts ship their source encrypted with ionCube and refuse to run without the ionCube Loader. This page covers that, and adding any other extension.

What is installed

To see the extension set the panel manages:

rpm -q --requires corepanel-php

And the extensions actually loaded by one PHP version:

php84 -m            # or php83, php82, php74

CorePanel does not manage php.ini or the php.d directory. It writes one file per account under /etc/opt/remi/php<version>/php-fpm.d/<username>.conf and nothing else, so anything you add to php.d is yours and survives updates.

Installing the ionCube Loader

The Loader is packaged in the Remi repository, which CorePanel already enables during installation. There is nothing to download from ionCube’s website and nothing to compile:

dnf install php84-php-ioncube-loader
systemctl restart php84-php-fpm

Repeat for every version you want to cover — the package name always follows the php<version>-php-ioncube-loader pattern:

dnf install php83-php-ioncube-loader php82-php-ioncube-loader php74-php-ioncube-loader
systemctl restart php83-php-fpm php82-php-fpm php74-php-fpm

Verify it loaded:

php84 -v

The output gains a line naming the ionCube PHP Loader. If it does not appear, the restart is usually what is missing — a zend_extension is read when the PHP process starts, so a running FPM master keeps serving without it.

What the package puts on disk

Two files per PHP version, and that is the whole installation:

Path	What it is
/etc/opt/remi/php84/php.d/01-ioncube_loader.ini	The zend_extension line that loads it
/opt/remi/php84/root/usr/lib64/php/modules/ioncube_loader.so	The Loader itself

The 01- prefix matters and is why the packaged version is worth using: ionCube has to be loaded before OPcache, and the numbering guarantees that ordering. A hand-installed Loader dropped into php.ini is the usual cause of “it is installed but PHP does not see it”.

Because the .ini lives in the version’s shared php.d, one install covers both the web pools and the command line — so encoded software also runs from cron jobs and from SSH, with no extra step.

It applies to a whole PHP version

The Loader is enabled per PHP version, not per account. Installing it for PHP 8.4 enables it for every account running PHP 8.4.

This is a property of PHP itself, not a CorePanel limitation: a zend_extension is loaded when the interpreter starts, and an FPM pool can only override php.ini settings, not load an engine extension. There is no per-account switch to build on top of that.

In practice it costs nothing. The Loader is inert for accounts with no encoded files — it adds a small amount of memory per PHP process and does not change how ordinary PHP runs.

Accounts are pinned to a PHP version

An account’s PHP version is chosen when the account is created and cannot be changed afterwards (see Hosting Accounts). So install the Loader for every version that customers actually run — checking only the default version is how a migrated account on an older PHP ends up with a white page.

Keeping it after updates

dnf update keeps the Loader current along with everything else, and CorePanel never removes it — an update only touches files the panel owns.

One case does need you: when CorePanel adds a new PHP version, the Loader for that version is not pulled in automatically, because it is not part of the corepanel-php dependency set. If you start creating accounts on a newly added version, install its Loader package too.

Adding any other extension

The same pattern covers the rest of the Remi catalogue — the package name is php<version>-php-<extension>:

dnf install php84-php-pecl-imagick php84-php-soap
systemctl restart php84-php-fpm

Two things worth knowing before you do:

• Install it for each version you need. The packages are independent per version; php84-php-soap does nothing for an account on PHP 8.3.
• A wrong name only warns. dnf install prints No match for argument and exits successfully, so a typo looks like a successful install. Confirm with php84 -m rather than trusting the transaction.

If an extension is not in Remi at all, prefer a pecl build over editing php.ini by hand, and always drop the resulting .ini in the version’s php.d directory so ordering and updates keep working the way they do for everything else.