Zephir Language Documentation

Zephir Kernel is a meta-framework built on top of the Zend API designed to facilitate the creation of PHP extensions. It allows developers to write C code using a style that is familiar to PHP developers, abstracting much of the complexity of the Zend API.

Key capabilities provided by the Zephir Kernel include:

• Manipulation of arrays and objects.
• Calling functions and methods within the PHP userland.
• Automatic memory management.
• Requiring and executing plain PHP files.
• Simplification of common operations (e.g., string concatenation).
• Reading superglobals and updating the active symbol table.
• Registering classes within namespaces.
• Throwing exceptions.

To install Zephir on Windows, clone or download the repository, add its directory to your system PATH, and run composer install.

Prerequisites:

• Visual Studio 2012 Express (activated).
• PHP (NTS) installed and added to your PATH.
• PHP SDK (use php-sdk-binary-tools-20110915.zip for PHP 5.6, or the Microsoft releases for PHP 7.0+).
• PHP Developer Pack (NTS) extracted to a local directory.

Setup Commands:

setx path "%path%;c:\path-to-zephir"
cd c:\path-to-zephir
composer install

To build a Zephir extension on Windows, you must use the appropriate Visual Studio Command Prompt and initialize the PHP SDK environment.

1. Open the correct Command Prompt:
   • For PHP 7 or later: Open the Visual Studio 2015 Command Prompt (or run "%VS140COMNTOOLS%\VsDevCmd").
   • For PHP 5.5 or later: Open the Visual Studio 2012 Command Prompt (or run "%VS110COMNTOOLS%\VsDevCmd").
2. Initialize the SDK: Execute %PHP_SDK%\bin\phpsdk_setvars.
3. Build: cd to your extension directory and run zephir build.
4. Locate Output: The resulting .dll will be in your_ext/Release/php_extname.dll (or your_ext/Release_TS/php_extname.dll for Thread Safe builds).

# Example workflow
"%VS140COMNTOOLS%\VsDevCmd"
%PHP_SDK%\bin\phpsdk_setvars
cd c:\path-to-your-extension
zephir build

Zephir requires specific environment variables to be set for the PHP SDK and Developer Pack to be recognized during the build process.

Set the following variables using setx:

• php_sdk: The path to your PHP SDK.
• php_devpack: The path to your extracted PHP Developer Pack (NTS).

Example:

setx php_sdk "c:\path-to-php-sdk"
setx php_devpack "c:\path-to-extracted-devpack"

The Zephir Parser is required for Zephir to function. Follow these steps to install the DLL extension:

1. Download the latest Zephir Parser for Windows.
2. Extract the zephir_parser.dll file and copy it to your PHP extensions directory.
3. Add the extension to your php.ini file:

[Zephir Parser]
extension=zephir_parser.dll