PHP Multibyte String on Heroku

Question

Does anybody know how to install the PHP Extension: Multibyte String for Heroku: http://php.net/manual/en/book.mbstring.php

Here is how I installed Mongo for Heroku:

https://gist.github.com/1288447

All is well, but I cannot find the source for compiling the mbstring.so file.

Any guidance would be most appreciated.

Answer 1

The preferred way of getting extensions for Heroku would be to use composer.json. mbstring is one of the extensions that Heroku provides pre-compiled and shared according to https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/php-support#extensions

To use it, all you have to do is create a composer.json file (if you don't already have one) in the root of your project with the following contents:

{
    "require": { 
        "ext-mbstring": "*"
    }
}

There is no need to compile your own mbstring extension or grab a compiled version from somewhere else.

As a side note, there's also no longer a need to compile the MongoDB extension yourself, either. It's also on the list of Heroku-provided extensions and you could have a composer.json file do both, like this:

{
    "require": { 
        "ext-mbstring": "*",
        "ext-mongo": "*"
    }
}