“Compiling” the cURL library with PHP 5 on Windows

Since I use Windows at home and work, my development system is:

• Windows XP
• Apache 2
• PHP 5

This means, obviously, I don’t compile anything.  Personally I like to install PHP with the Windows binary and then download the full zip package as well.  After I’ve installed I unzip and copy and paste all the libraries/DLLs I don’t have from the zip to my installation directory.  (I just overwrite all the extensions…I’m little more choosy with the DLLs that are in the PHP root folder.  Normally the zip contains more libraries than the PHP installer provides and this helps ensure I’m not “missing” files.)  After that I attend to customizing php.ini (and, of course, Apache).

Using the cURL library with PHP 4 was as simple as uncommenting extension=php_curl.dll in php.ini (as I recall).  But with PHP 5 I was getting the following startup error:

Unable to load dynamic library php_curl.dll – The specified module could not be found

But it was there…and I was looking right at it — the exact path was the one the error claimed did not exist.  And my other extensions in that directory were working.

If you are using Windows, Apache, and PHP 5 and can’t get cURL to work/cURL to load even though it seems like it should, check that these two files:

• libeay32.dll
• ssleay32.dll

Are located C:\Windows\System32

You can get those from the aforementioned zip.  I dunno why, I just know it worked.