Running FLOW3 on debian-based systems.

Af: Christian Jul Jensen

FLOW3 is the cutting edge php development framework developed by the TYPO3 Community. It brings buzzwords like AOP, IoC, JSR-283 etc to the php world. It depends on PHP 5.3, and here is a few words about and links to installing that and FLOW3 on kubuntu and other debian-based systems.

We're in Berlin for the T3CON08 at the moment and I have been able to catch up on the development of FLOW3 which I haven't had time to do for the last months.

Lots of cool stuff has happened: Karsten did a very cool implementation of the persistence framework, so finally it is now possible to store stuff, which of course is a prerequisite for making real webapplications and not just play around with the framework. Also Andi has made the AOP-based security framework that looks really promising. So all in all, while FLOW3 is still in it's early development phase, things are really starting to look good and usable. I can't wait to play around with the current source and hopefully find some time to participate in development again.

Anyway, one of the reasons that I haven't been running the framework for a while is that the guys in Lübeck decided to be first-movers and require PHP 5.3, which is still only in alpha. The main reason for this is the support for namespaces.

It turns out that it is not the easiest thing to actually get PHP 5.3 running. Obviously there are no packages for any system yet, you have to compile it yourself.

The PHP make script assumes some different stuff about the apache environment which is not true for debian-based systems, so there is a few tricks you need to do.

I found this tutorial about installing PHP 5.3 on ubuntu which works pretty well.

Update (2008-10-13): One important thing is to use the alpha1 release from downloads.php.net/johannes/, later versions produces fatal errors when running FLOW3.

Just a few comments to this: I found it kind of annoying that you have to trick the PHP make by adding fake apache config to httpd.html. I looked into the issue and it seems that there is really no way to get around this.

The other thing is that I really suggest that you use checkinstall instead of 'make instalĺ'. This will generate a debian package to install, keeping your system clean. I didn't succed in installing it this way unfortunately, so right now I have no package to offer for you, but you should defintely try it out first.

Also I had to install the libtool package.

After following the tutorial, I just had to restart apache, an check out FLOW3 from subversion, and voila it was running.

BTW: We are now the official FLOW3 Coffee Sponsor :)