Installing the Postgres extension for Hiphop

PostGres is rapidly gaining traction as a solid relational database manager. It provides transaction reliability (ACID), standards compliance, and has a better reputation for handling large datasets than MariaDB / mySQL.

Luckily installing it for Hiphop is painless and there is an externally provided extension for it.

There was not a prebuilt package available for the PocketRent/hhvm-pgsql extension for my version of Hiphop so I built it following the advice in the project readme. Their instructions worked first time.

I did not have success with using the "ini" method of including the extension so had to create a Hiphop configuration file.

 DynamicExtensionPath = /path/to/hhvm/extensions  
 DynamicExtensions {  
   * = pgsql.so  
 }

I placed the snippet they provide (above) into a file called config.hdf in my Hiphop location. I'm using Mint on my dev box so this was /etc/hhvm/config.hdf for me.

Then I edited /etc/default/hhvm and set Hiphop up to use the config file. This snippet shows the change:

 ## Add additional arguments to the hhvm service start up that you can't put in CONFIG_FILE for some reason.  
 ## Default: ""  
 ## Examples:  
 ##  "-vLog.Level=Debug"        Enable debug log level  
 ##  "-vServer.DefaultDocument=app.php" Change the default document  
 ADDITIONAL_ARGS="-c /etc/hhvm/config.hdf"

After that I restarted my hhvm service and was able to use Postgres in my Laravel project. Hurray :)

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