ADODB on FreeBSD

Recently I’ve had one of my student assistants working on setting up a web server. She’s pretty much got it, except that she hasn’t been able to establish a connection from the web server to our database server.

We’re wanting to use ADODB to connect to a mssql server. She figured out how to install the databases/adodb5 port (and how to get ADODB included in the PHP configuration), but that wasn’t enough by itself. I thought there might be a PHP extension required, and a little Unix pipe revealed the missing module:

# grep -i ^php /usr/ports/INDEX-7 | grep -v ^php4 | grep -i adodb

The command above searches the ports index for lines starting with “php” (or “PHP”), ignores those which begin with “php4” (I’m not interested in version 4 stuff), and searches everything that’s matched so far for “adodb” (or “ADODB”). Results:

php-adodb-ext... (long index line snipped)

A quick check of /var/db/pkg verified that this module hadn’t been installed yet. I installed the module via portmaster(8) and added the new extension per the pkg-message instructions:

# portmaster databases/php-adodb-ext
.
.
.
(installation stuff snipped)
# cat >>/usr/local/etc/php/extensions.ini
extension=adodb.so

Now we’re getting a different error:

PHP Fatal error:  Call to undefined function mssql_get_last_message() in /usr/local/share/adodb/drivers/adodb-mssql.inc.php on line 501

Google indicates the problem is likely that the mssql extension for PHP isn’t installed. I ran the same pipe that I did for ADODB, this time searching for mssql:

# grep -i ^php /usr/ports/INDEX-7 | grep -v ^php4 | grep -i adodb

php5-mssql... (long index line snipped)

So another portmaster(8) installation, this time for php5-mssql. One of php5-mssql’s dependencies is freetds-msdblib, which has some configuration options. The only one I’m setting is MSDBLIB, which enables MS SQLserver (in lieu of the old Sybase DB).

This port (php5-mssql) automatically registers itself as a PHP extension, so you don’t have to add a line to /usr/local/etc/php/extensions.ini yourself.

I’m still getting errors, but they’re starting to look like problems with the database connection string instead of server configuration now. Progress, of a sort. But that’s enough for now–It’s almost 8:00 pm on Friday night before a 3-day weekend, long past time for me to get on with my own life!