PL/php

= Creating the PL/php language in a PostgreSQL database =

In 8.1 and beyond you need to have a PL/php entry in the pg_pltemplate system catalog.
You can insert one by issuing, as a superuser: {{{
CREATE FUNCTION plphp_call_handler() RETURNS language_handler
LANGUAGE C AS '$libdir/plphp', 'plphp_call_handler';

CREATE FUNCTION plphp_validator(oid) RETURNS language_handler
LANGUAGE C AS '$libdir/plphp', 'plphp_validator';

INSERT INTO pg_pltemplate VALUES
('plphp', 't', 'plphp_call_handler', 'plphp_validator', '$libdir/plphp.so', NULL);

INSERT INTO pg_pltemplate VALUES
('plphpu', 'f', 'plphp_call_handler', 'plphp_validator', '$libdir/plphp.so', NULL);
}}}
(note you '''DON'T''' have to edit the $libdir. Leave it alone. It will be expanded by PostgreSQL automatically.)

This will create entries for the trusted and untrusted versions of PL/php. Note that pg_pltemplate is a shared catalog, which means you have to do it only once in any database and it will be available in all your databases automatically.

In any database where you want to use PL/php you need to issue simply

{{{
CREATE LANGUAGE plphp;
}}}

or {{{
CREATE LANGUAGE plphpu;
}}}
(the latter will create the untrusted version, which by default only superusers can write functions in).

Now the language is ready to be used.

If you receive an error similar to:

{{{
ERROR: could not load library "/usr/local/lib/postgresql/plphp.so":
libphp4.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
}}}

it means the Postmaster can't find the PHP shared library. A solution
you may use is to define the LD_LIBRARY_PATH to postmaster, like so:

{{{
LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/lib/apache2/modules:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH postmaster
}}}

Of course this isn't ideal. You may want to define the variable somewhere in your start script (/etc/init.d/postgresql or whatever). This is too varied across Linux distributions or other operating systems so I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader.