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Development

Here are some instructions for building the New Relic PHP agent yourself.

Requirements

Check out what's important before you get started:

Development Platform

Currently, the PHP agent has only been developed and compiled on Linux systems. Below is a partial list of platforms (and their dependences) that the PHP agent can be built on:

Operating Systems

  • Fully supported for building from source
    • Ubuntu 16.04+
    • CentOS/RHEL 7+
  • Supported in binary form only (may require experimentation to build)
    • FreeBSD
    • Alpine Linux
    • AWS Linux 2
    • Any Linux with Kernel >=2.6.26 and glibc >=2.5 (or musl libc >= 1.1)

Build system dependencies

  • build-essential on Debian systems, "Development Tools" group on RHEL systems, equivalent packages on other supported systems for make, cmake, gcc, etc.
  • valgrind is extensively in the test suite

Go

Install the latest version of Go. Typically it's installed in /usr/local/go. Be sure to extend your $PATH to include it!

Libraries

  • libbzip
  • libcurl
  • libedit
  • libjpeg-turbo
  • libmcrypt
  • libpng
  • libreadline
  • libtidy
  • libtool-ltdl
  • libxml2
  • libxslt
  • openssl
  • pcre
  • zlib

Application development headers

(most operating systems package these with -dev or -devel suffixes)

  • freetds
  • freetype
  • httpd
  • libmemcached
  • mariadb
  • php
  • postgresql
  • sqlite

PHP

The PHP agent supports PHP versions 5.5, 5.6, 7.0, 7.1, 7.2, 7.3, 7.4,8.0, and 8.1.

Build the PHP Agent

Hooray, you've met all the requirements! Now, let's build the agent. From the top level of the PHP agent directory, run make to build both the agent and daemon.

make

You can find the agent in agent/.libs/newrelic.so, and the daemon and associated Go binaries are in newrelic-php-agent/bin.

To build the agent and install it to the active PHP installation:

make agent-install

For this to work with the daemon, copy the daemon binary (found in newrelic-php-agent/bin) to usr/bin/newrelic-daemon.

Configuration settings

The PHP agent is configured using a newrelic.ini config file. To get started with configuration, you can follow the basic steps below, or you can check out our detailed documentation.

  1. Create your own copy of the template found in agent/scripts/newrelic.ini.template.
  2. Insert the newrelic.ini file in the same location as your php.ini (Running php --ini will tell you where that is).
  3. Once your newrelic.ini is created and in the correct location, edit the file and add the following:
    • A license key (Insert a valid key: newrelic.license = "INSERT_YOUR_LICENSE_KEY")
    • A unique application name
    • The full path to your daemon
  4. Make sure your log directory exists and is read/writable (/opt/nr/logs or /var/log/ are good options).

NOTE: The default log level for both is info, but this can be changed in both the agent and daemon. The more verbose log settings can generate a lot of information very quickly. When necessary, we suggest setting debug for short periods of time to identify problems.

The default configuration settings should work for most cases, but here are some examples of customized settings:

newrelic.logfile = "/opt/nr/logs/php_agent.log"
newrelic.appname = "INSERT_YOUR_APP_NAME"
newrelic.daemon.logfile = "/opt/nr/logs/newrelic-daemon.log"
newrelic.daemon.location = "INSERT_THE_PARENT_DIRECTORY_OF_PHP_AGENT/newrelic-php-agent/bin/daemon"

Once the agent is compiled, make sure the newrelic.so extension you just created is somewhere PHP can see it. You can do this by editing the extension setting.

extension = "INSERT_THE_PARENT_DIRECTORY_OF_PHP_AGENT/newrelic-php-agent/agent/.libs/newrelic.so"

Testing

The PHP agent unit tests are split into two categories: agent and axiom unit tests. The agent unit tests contain all of the tests related to PHP instrumentation while the axiom unit tests contain all of the PHP independent tests.

To run both the agent and axiom unit tests:

make run_tests

Both unit tests can be run under Valgrind to check for memory issues:

make valgrind

NOTE: Although agent integration tests are available, all tests will fail due to internal licensing requirements. This will be changed in the future and will allow integration tests to be run locally by anyone.

Make

Here is a partial list of Makefile capabilities. All targets should support parallel compilation using -j.

Build commands

command function
make -j8 Use 8 CPUs
make agent Just build the agent
make agent-install Build the agent and install it to the active PHP installation
make daemon Build the daemon

Test commands

command function
make run_tests Build and run the agent and axiom unit tests (Agent unit tests currently require Linux)
make run_tests TESTS=test_txn Run only the test_txn.c tests
make run_tests SKIP_TESTS=test_rpm Skip the test_rpm.c tests
make valgrind Build and run the agent tests under valgrind and fail if any memory leaks occur
make agent-valgrind Build and run the agent tests under valgrind
make axiom-valgrind Build and run the axiom tests under valgrind
make daemon_integration Build the daemon unit tests
make daemon_bench Run the daemon performance tests

Clean commands

command function
make clean Cleans everything! This should return your working directory to a pristine, slightly minty state
make agent-clean Just cleans the agent. Useful if you want to build against a different PHP version but don't want to rebuild axiom or the daemon
make axiom-clean Just clean axiom
make daemon-clean Just clean the daemon

Take the agent for a spin

Once the agent (and daemon) are built and configured, monitoring can commence. Below is a quick example to demonstrate instrumentation:

phpinfo()

For this example our app is named phpinfo example. First, we create a simple .php file that contains a call to phpinfo(). Next, we run it to start the agent and begin instrumentation. We should be able to see activity in the both the agent and daemon logs at this point. Any PHP program that is run (when the agent is correctly configured) will automatically start the agent and daemon.

echo "<?php phpinfo(); ?>" > phpinfo.php
php phpinfo.php # Do this a few times to fully connect

Within a few minutes, the application should be available in your New Relic account. Navigate to the APM Summary page in New Relic One to view your instrumented application.

phpinfo() transaction example

The transaction page lists the your app's transaction requests, the top five transactions by percent of wall-clock time, and relevant throughputs (requests per minute or rpm). This helps you identify transactions that may be good candidates for fine-tuning performance problems or resolving errors.

phpinfo() transaction example

Start the daemon manually

You can start the daemon manually or via the agent (the previous example had the agent start the daemon). To start it manually, tell the daemon not to launch automatically in your newrelic.ini with newrelic.daemon.dont_launch = 3 and start it with appropriate flags. See our daemon .ini and newrelic.cfg settings for more information.

./bin/daemon -f -logfile stdout -loglevel debug

PHP Agent API

The PHP agent API allows you to extend the functionality of the PHP agent. The agent API is included by default with your installation, so no additional configuration is required to use the agent.

Among other things, you can use the API to:

  • Customize your app name
  • Collect errors
  • Record custom attributes, custom events, and custom metrics
  • Enable or disable browser monitoring

For an introduction to this API, see our guide to the PHP agent API.

Troubleshooting

If you are having issues with the PHP Agent, our troubleshooting documents are a great starting point.