Creating the PL/php language in a PostgreSQL 8.0 database¶

In 8.0 you need to create the PL/php language using these commands:

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

CREATE TRUSTED LANGUAGE plphp 
HANDLER plphp_call_handler;

CREATE LANGUAGE plphpu 
HANDLER plphp_call_handler;

(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 you need to repeat these steps in every database you want to use PL/php in. You may want to create it in the template1 database so that it's automatically created in new databases.

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.