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5.1. Quickstart

The Quickstart tab in the Project Settings dialog is illustrated below:

Quickstart Settings

The fields that need to be entered are:

• Project source folder: This is the folder containing your PHP source code. You may have files and folders within this. You can select the source folder just by clicking on the Browse... button.
• Target folder name: This is where the encoded versions of your files will be put. This will be just the name of a folder and not a path. If this folder does not exist then it will be created by the Encoder.
• Location of the project target folder: This is a path to the folder that will contain the target folder. This can be selected by clicking on the Browse... button. The ionCube PHP Encoder will create the target folder within this location if it does not already exist.
• Encoder version: The ionCube PHP Encoder package not only contains the current encoders but also has the encoders from the previous two versions, legacy (the previous version, 12.0) and obsolete (two versions ago, 11.0). The purpose of providing those older encoders is to cover the case where some of your customers have older loaders and cannot update them to the latest version. That may occur if they are on certain shared web hosts. Files produced by the legacy version should work with version 12.0 loaders and above. Files produced by the obsolete version should work with version 11.0 loaders and above.
• PHP source language: This is the minimum version of PHP that an end user must have in order to run the encoded files. It must be high enough to include all the language features used by the scripts. Details about the differences between PHP versions can be found in the PHP manual. For performance reasons it is recommended to pick the highest PHP version you can that will still be low enough to satisfy the expected end user base. Although files encoded for a given PHP version may be able to run on a future version of PHP, this is not always possible. To enable generation of files that are compatible with a wider range of PHP versions, the Encoder has a feature called bundling, where encodings for multiple versions of PHP are combined into a single file. Bundling options are available for the following combinations of PHP:
  
  • PHP 5.6 & 7.1 (PHP 5.6 and 7.1 to 7.4)
  • PHP 7.4 & 8.1 (not 8.2)
  • PHP 7.4, 8.1 & 8.2
  • PHP 8.1 & 8.2

Having entered the above settings, click on the OK button and you will then be ready to encode your project.