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How to Install the Sodium Cryptographic Library (libsodium) and PHP Extension on cPanel

Austin Lowery
  • Updated

Introduction

The overall process has two main steps:

Step 1 - Install the base libsodium library via your server's package manager. (yum, dnf, apt)

Step 2 - Use one of the below procedures corresponding to your version of PHP to install the PHP extension for Sodium.

Step 1 - Installing The Base Sodium Library (libsodium)

CentOS 7 & CloudLinux 7

  1. Login to the server via SSH or Terminal as the root user
  2. Install the EPEL repository with the following command: 
    yum install epel-release
  3. Install the Sodium library and companion development package with the following command: 
    yum install libsodium libsodium-devel

AlmaLinux 8 & CloudLinux 8

  1. Login to the server via SSH or Terminal as the root user
  2. Install the Sodium library and companion development package with the following command: 
    dnf install libsodium libsodium-devel

Ubuntu 20.04 LTS

  1. Login to the server via SSH or Terminal as the root user
  2. Install the Sodium library and companion development package with the following command: 
    apt install libsodium-dev libsodium23

Step 2 - Install the PHP Extension for ea-php74 and Newer via WHM

ea-php74 and Newer via EasyApache in WHM

  1. Login to WHM as the root user
  2. Navigate to: Home » Software » EasyApache 4
  3. Click the blue "Customize" button
  4. Click the "PHP Extensions" link in the left sidebar
  5. Enter libsodium into the search box
  6. Toggle the libsodium extension so that it turns blue for each desired version of PHP
  7. Click the "Review" link in the left sidebar
  8. Scroll to the bottom of the page and click the blue "Provision" button
  9. Optionally create a PHP Info script to verify that the extensions are available on your website:
    How to use a PHPInfo Script for Troubleshooting PHP Issues

ea-php73 and Older via PECL on the Command Line

Please note, older versions of ea-php are not available on AlmaLinux, CloudLinux 8 and Ubuntu

  1. Login to the server via SSH or Terminal as the root user
  2. Issue the following command to find the PECL binaries for each version of PHP you have installed: 
    find /opt/cpanel/ -iname pecl | grep bin | grep -E "(5[4-6])|(7[0-3])"
  3. Choose the PECL binary path that matches your desired PHP version, and install the libsodium extension. The following example uses PHP 7.3 
    /opt/cpanel/ea-php73/root/usr/bin/pecl install libsodium
  4. Optionally create a PHP Info script to verify that the extensions are available on your website:
    How to use a PHPInfo Script for Troubleshooting PHP Issues

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