whmcs/install/install.php was encoded by the ionCube Encoder for PHP 5 and cannot run under PHP 5.5

Question

When I tried to install whmcs, I got this error.

/whmcs/install/install.php was encoded by the ionCube Encoder for PHP 5 and cannot run 
under PHP 5.5.\n Please ask the provider of the script to provide a version encoded with 
either the ionCube Encoder for PHP 5.3 or for PHP 5.4. in Unknown on line 0

My Server has PHP 5.5.8, Apache/2.4.6 (Ubuntu)

How can I fix this issue without downgrading PHP ?

Answer 1

It looks like you're using an older version of the ionCube Loader that isn't compatible with PHP5.5. They've released an updated version that apparently works with PHP5.5. You can download new versions here: http://www.ioncube.com/loaders.php

Answer 2

The problem is the people of WHMCS as they won't update their system to be compatible with 5.5 as they wrote us. It might take months or longer until this perhaps will happen they wrote to us! As this thread is from February 2014 you see that until now nothing has pappened and it looks as they have no solution at all available now, nor they want to deliver the code unencoded for the time being or decode it with another php-encoder or reencode WHMCS with ioncube for php 5.5.

the people from ioncube wrote:

we cannot offer a solution at this time ... Again, this is not a deliberate restriction, but rather a result of PHP's tremendous changes in their execution engine. For now the only fix for you appears to be to downgrade for PHP 5.4.

And WHMCS wrote

Exactly, so as of our next major release we will no longer be supporting PHP 5.2 so that we can encode using the version of Ioncube which supports PHP 5.3 and above. The current version of WHMCS still supports PHP 5.2, so at this time it isn't possible for us to distribute a single copy which supports 5.2 and 5.5+.

and

I can advise that we will not be releasing v6.0 this weekend, a beta is expected in the next few months.

Therefore it is advised to switch probably to better applications which got updated to PHP 5.5 already.

i.e.

www.wefact.com/wefact-hosting/pricing/

hostbillapp.com/pricing

thehostingtool.com/home (FREE)

http://shinesoftware.github.io/shineisp/ (FREE)

www.clientexec.com/pricing.php

www.boxbilling.com/order (FREE and cheap pro license)

Which one of those would be the best alternative to WHMCS we don't know, you need to test them!

Read also here Ioncube difficulty with PHP 5.5 The problem seems to be ioncube AND WHMCS as they seem to ignore the progress and improvements made in PHP.

The people from ioncube just wrote me again which makes the problem very clear:

Hi,

We strongly urge our Encoder customers (such as WHMCS) to encode for PHP 5.3 or higher, since this will provide PHP 5.5 and PHP 5.6 support. If they do not comply and do not offer PHP 5.5 and 5.6 support, it is their choice in doing so. While WHMCS has announced PHP 5.5 support a few months back ( blog.whmcs.com/?t=92179 ) and they have the means to encode a version with PHP 5.5 support, there are no updates on this as of yet. However, this is a problem that WHMCS has to handle, as we are unable to force them to upgrade their scripts.

Are your applications explicitly using PHP 5.6 or PHP 5.5 features? If not, then you should still be able to downgrade to PHP 5.4. The adaption for PHP 5.6 (and even PHP 5.5) is still extremely low (less than 5% for 5.5, less than 1% for 5.6), so any commercial script providing exclusive PHP 5.5 support is not economically viable (Source: w3techs.com/technologies/details/pl-php/5/all ). If you are running your own scripts using PHP 5.5 and 5.6 language features, it should be possible to replace these files for now with PHP 5.4 compliant scripts until your dependencies have released PHP 5.5 / 5.6 support.

Regarding the limitation: As stated in previously, due to tremendous changes in the PHP 5.5 execution engine, we were forced to abandon PHP 5.2 support. This is not a deliberate decision to purposefully break PHP 5.2 or lower support, but rather a limitation of our engineering resources. Until PHP 5.5, our Loaders have contained complex code that allows old and incompatible files to work on newer versions of PHP. This is technically challenging to develop, requiring the Loader to analyse and actually modify parts of the compiled code on the fly to make them work, but even though the Loader is free, it's something we always invested as much time and money in as was necessary to achieve.