PHP and "turning on" mysqli

Question

I'm having trouble finding documentation about how exactly to go about "turning on" mysqli. I'm running OS X SL and, as I understand it, since php5 is installed, the mysqli extension should already be there as well.

Is this as simple as adding a LoadModule line to php.ini? If I need to re-compile php, does anyone know of a good link where I could follow along to do that (so I don't goof anything up)?

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

PHP.net said:

As of PHP 5.0, MySQL support is no longer enabled by default with the standard PHP distributions.

You will need to configure PHP with MySQLi-support. Why don't take the safe (and probably best), object oriented, road and go with the PDO classes?

Answer 2

Save yourself the headache and install the entropy PHP package or MAMP. Getting all the commonly needed PHP modules working on OSX is non-trivial. Most people I know go with either one of those packages.

Answer 3

If php5 was compiled with mysqli support already, then all you should need to do is point to that library in php.ini

extension=mysqli.so

After adding that you will probably need to restart apache.

Note: The filename for the mysqli library might differ on some platforms.

Answer 4

I was trying to install the MediaWiki on Snow Leopard with MySQL 5.1.41, which needed this as well. After plenty of stumbling around, the solution was extremely simple...

In /etc/php.ini, change the following lines from:

pdo_mysql.default_socket = /var/mysql/mysql.sock mysql.default_socket = /var/mysql/mysql.sock mysqli.default_socket = /var/mysql/mysql.sock

to: pdo_mysql.default_socket = /tmp/mysql.sock mysql.default_socket = /tmp/mysql.sock mysqli.default_socket = /tmp/mysql.sock

While I had linked /tmp/mysql.sock to /var/mysql, this didn't kick in until I actually edited the file.