I have started using Suphp on some of our confixx servers. Suphp hast one big advantage over mod php it executes PHP scripts with the permissions of their owners. Which is extremely useful on multi domain servers. Otherwise you always have the problem that files uploaded via FTP have different permissions than files upload via http. For example plugins uploaded via the wordpress backend or photos via php gallery. One of the big downsides of Suphp for us is that you cannot use .htaccess files for mod rewrite and so on. This is were htscanner comes along this is the description. Allow one to use htaccess-like file to configure PHP. sounds good 🙂 You need to perform the following steps to install htscanner on debian or ubuntu:

1. Download htscanner:

wget http://pecl.php.net/get/htscanner-0.9.0.tgz

2. Unpack the archive:

tar -xzvf htscanner-0.9.0.tgz

3. Install dependencies:

aptitude install php5-dev php-config

4. Change into the htscanner directory:

cd htscanner-0.9.0

5. run phpize

phpize

6. Configure htscanner

./configure --enable-htscanner

7. Then make and make install

make && make install

8. This should have installed htscanner at the end of the install you should see the install path.

9. Create a file to get the htscanner module loaded:

vi /etc/php5/cgi/conf.d/htscanner.ini

10. With the following content:

extension=htscanner.so

11. restart the Apache web server and you can use .htaccess files again.