v8js

V8Js on GNU/Linux

Installation of V8Js on GNU/Linux is pretty much straight forward.

The biggest hurdle actually is that you need a rather new v8 library. However most distributions still ship the rusty version 3.14, publish years ago, since Node.js requires such an old version.

This means that you usually need to compile v8 on your own before you can start to compile & install v8js itself.

Snapshots

V8 has (optional) support for so-called snapshots which speed up startup performance drastically. Hence they are generally recommended for use.

There are two flavours of snapshots: internal & external.

Internal snapshots are built right into the V8 library (libv8.so file), so there's no need to handle them specially.

Besides there are external snapshots (which are enabled unless configured otherwise). If V8 is compiled with these, then V8Js needs to provide two "binary blobs" to V8, named natives_blob.bin and snapshot_blob.bin. In that case copy those two files to /usr/share/v8/....

Compile latest V8

cd /tmp

# Install depot_tools first (needed for source checkout)
git clone https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/tools/depot_tools.git
export PATH=`pwd`/depot_tools:"$PATH"

# Download v8
fetch v8
cd v8

# (optional) If you'd like to build a certain version:
git checkout 4.9.385.28
gclient sync

# use libicu of operating system
export GYP_DEFINES="use_system_icu=1"

# Build (with internal snapshots)
export GYPFLAGS="-Dv8_use_external_startup_data=0"
make native library=shared snapshot=on -j8

# Install to /usr
sudo mkdir -p /usr/lib /usr/include
sudo cp out/native/lib.target/lib*.so /usr/lib/
sudo cp -R include/* /usr/include

# Install libv8_libplatform.a (V8 >= 5.2.51)
echo -e "create /usr/lib/libv8_libplatform.a\naddlib out/native/obj.target/src/libv8_libplatform.a\nsave\nend" | sudo ar -M

# ... same for V8 < 5.2.51, libv8_libplatform.a is built in tools/gyp directory
echo -e "create /usr/lib/libv8_libplatform.a\naddlib out/native/obj.target/tools/gyp/libv8_libplatform.a\nsave\nend" | sudo ar -M

• If you don't want to overwrite the system copy of v8, replace /usr in the above commands with some other path like /opt/v8 and then add --with-v8js=/opt/v8 to the php-v8js ./configure command below.

libv8_libplatform.a should not be copied directly since it's a thin archive, i.e. it contains only pointers to the build objects, which otherwise must not be deleted. The simple mri-script converts the thin archive to a normal archive.

Compile php-v8js itself

cd /tmp
git clone https://github.com/phpv8/v8js.git
cd v8js
phpize
./configure
make
make test
sudo make install

Then add extension=v8js.so to your php.ini file. If you have a separate configuration for CLI, add it there also.