Compiling FreeTDS under Windows

Note: This page is a work-in-progress. Feedback and suggested improvements are welcome. Please join the discussion on moodle.org or use the page comments.

Requirements

• MSVC 6.0 (Microsoft Visual C++ 6.0) with Service Packs installed.
• FreeTDS (tested with 0.84).
• PHP source files
• These packages (non-debug):
  • From http://pecl2.php.net/downloads/php-windows-builds/php-libs/ :
    • binary-tools.zip
  • From http://pecl2.php.net/downloads/php-windows-builds/php-libs/VC6/x86/ :
    • bindlib
    • libiconv
    • libxml
    • libxlst
    • zlib

Build Steps

• Create c:\dev
• Create c:\dev\php-build
• Uncompress all the packages listed in requirements and PHP into c:\dev\php-build (replacing all when uncompressing).
• Copy uncompressed freetds folder to C:\dev\php-build (rename it to, simply, "freetds").
• Open the C:\dev\php-build\freetds\win32\msvc6\FreeTDS.dsw Project Workspace (it's really important to get this Workspace and not any of the individual projects!).
• Select the "dblib files" project and then Build->Rebuild All, this should en with one dblib.lib library into C:\dev\php-build\freetd\win32\msvc6\db_Release
• Copy dblib.lib to C:\dev\php-build\lib
• Start CMD
• Create one C:\dev\prepare4php.bat file with contents below and execute it:

@set PATH=C:\dev\php-build\bin;%PATH%

@set INCLUDE=C:\dev\php-build\include;%INCLUDE%

@set LIB=C:\dev\php-build\lib;%LIB%

@set BISON_SIMPLE=C:\dev\php-build\bin\bison.simple

• Continue in CMD and change dir to C:\dev\php-build\php-x-x-x
• Execute this:
  • buildconf
  • cscript /nologo configure.js --disable-all --disable-ipv6 --enable-zts (--disable-zts) --with-dblib=shared --enable-object-out-dir=c:\dev --with-extra-includes=c:\dev\php-build\freetds\include;c:\dev\php-build\freetds\win32
  • nmake
• You should end with one C:\dev\Release_TS for the --enable-zts (or C:\dev\Release for the --disable-zts alternative) dir, with your compiled FreeTDS PHP module ready at the root level of that dir.

Notes

• By using --enable-zts or --disable-zts you'll end with different thread safe/no safe versions of the extension. Use them depending of your environment thread safety.
• If you one use PHP 5.2 version to build the lib, the extensions generated are expected to work against any PHP 5.2.x version (but not against other releases of PHP, like 5.1 or 5.3).
• MSVC 6.0 is required because it's the official tool used to build PHP binary distributions. It seems that, with PHP 5.3 they will start using MSVC 9 or so... corresponding extensions should use the same.
• Feel free to fix and improve this document. TIA!
• For any comment related to this, please use MDL-14725 in the Moodle Tracker.
• And MDL-11810 has a related discussion.