Copyright 1997-2012 the PHP Documentation Group.

The common Unix distributions include binary versions of PHP that can be installed. Although these binary versions are typically built with support for MySQL extensions enabled, the extension libraries themselves may need to be installed using an additional package. Check the package manager than comes with your chosen distribution for availability.

Unless your Unix distribution comes with a binary package of PHP with the mysqli extension available, you will need to build PHP from source code. Building PHP from source allows you to specify the MySQL extensions you want to use, as well as your choice of client library for each extension.

The MySQL Native Driver is the recommended option, as it results in improved performance and gives access to features not available when using the MySQL Client Library. Refer to What is PHP's MySQL Native Driver? for a brief overview of the advantages of MySQL Native Driver.

The /path/to/mysql_config represents the location of the mysql_config program that comes with MySQL Server.

Note that it is possible to freely mix MySQL extensions and client libraries. For example, it is possible to enable the MySQL extension to use the MySQL Client Library (libmysqlclient), while configuring the mysqli extension to use the MySQL Native Driver. However, all permutations of extension and client library are possible.

The following example builds the MySQL extension to use the MySQL Client Library, and the mysqli and PDO MYSQL extensions to use the MySQL Native Driver:

./configure --with-mysql=/usr/bin/mysql_config  \
--with-mysqli=mysqlnd \
--with-pdo-mysql=mysqlnd
[other options]