We've included the following php extensions, helpful for creating modern scripts, but obviously add as required in php/php.ini.
extension=curl
Enables PHP to make HTTP requests to external resources using the libcurl library.
Crucial for interacting with RESTful APIs, microservices, and third-party web services. This allows your application to fetch data from, or send data to, other systems, such as web scraping, file downloads and testing & debugging.
extension=gd
Provides a library for image manipulation, allowing PHP to create, modify, and display images, essential for handling user-uploaded images, resizing them, compressing them, adding watermarks, or changing their format.
extension=hash
Provides a unified interface to a wide range of hashing algorithms, this is arguably its most critical use case. Modern applications must securely store passwords. The hash extension allows developers to use strong, modern hashing algorithms like password_hass()
extension=imagick
Provides an object-oriented interface to the ImageMagick image processing library.
Offers a significantly more powerful and versatile set of image manipulation features than GD. This includes advanced effects, transformations, color management, support for a wider range of image formats (including vector formats like SVG), and multipage image handling (like TIFFs or PDFs).
extension=intl
Provides access to the ICU (International Components for Unicode) library, which is the standard for handling internationalization (i18n) and localization (l10n).
extension=mysqli
Provides an interface to MySQL databases, offering both procedural and object-oriented styles.
extension=mbstring
Enables multibyte string operations, essential for handling character encodings like UTF-8.
This is crucial for applications that deal with text from users or content in various languages. Without mbstring, string functions might incorrectly process multibyte characters, leading to garbled text or errors.
extension=openssl
Provides support for SSL/TLS encryption, allowing PHP to connect securely to remote servers and encrypt/decrypt data.
Enables PHP applications to make secure outbound requests to APIs or other services using HTTPS.
extension=pdo_mysql
A driver for PHP Data Objects (PDO) that allows access to MySQL databases.
Highly recommended for modern development. PDO provides a consistent interface for database access, meaning if you decide to switch from MySQL to PostgreSQL, for example, you can do so with minimal changes to your database interaction code, by simply swapping the PDO driver.
Also, supports prepared statements and parameter binding, which are the most effective ways to prevent SQL injection attacks.
extension=json
Provides functions for JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) encoding and decoding.
JSON is the de facto standard for data interchange in web APIs and AJAX requests. This extension is absolutely vital for parsing JSON responses from APIs and for encoding PHP arrays/objects into JSON to send to other services.
extension=sockets
Provides a low-level interface for network socket communication.
Enabling persistent connections for real-time applications like chat servers, online gaming, or live data feeds where you need direct, bidirectional communication channels.
extension=xml
Provides functionalities for parsing and manipulating XML (eXtensible Markup Language) documents.
This is necessary for applications that need to consume, generate, or transform XML data. This is common in older enterprise systems, web services (SOAP), RSS feeds, or configuration files.
extension=zip
Enables PHP to read and write ZIP archives.
Useful for creating zip files on the fly, for example, to package multiple downloadable files for a user.