Fatal error: Call to undefined function mcrypt_encrypt()

Question

NOTE: The libraries MCrypt support depend on have not been updated in years and MCrypt should no longer be considered a viable or secure method of encrypting data. What's more, MCrypt has been deprecated in PHP 5, and removed entirely in PHP 7. If you have any code that runs MCrypt you should refactor it to use a more modern encryption library.

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Does anyone know why this error message: (Call to undefined function mcrypt_encrypt() ) displays when I run the following code below?

Am I missing some steps perhaps any setting in PHP I have to do before this code can work?

$key = 'password to (en/de)crypt';
$string = 'string to be encrypted';

$test = mcrypt_encrypt(MCRYPT_RIJNDAEL_256, md5($key),
            $string, MCRYPT_MODE_CBC, md5(md5($key)));

Answer 1

If you have recently updated to ubuntu 14.04 here is the fix to this problem:

$ sudo mv /etc/php5/conf.d/mcrypt.ini /etc/php5/mods-available/
$ sudo php5enmod mcrypt
$ sudo service apache2 restart

Answer 2

What had worked for me with PHP version 5.2.8, was to open up php.ini and allow the php_mcrypt.dll extension by removing the ;, i.e. changing:

;extension=php_mcrypt.dll to extension=php_mcrypt.dll