The ext_skel script
A Zend extension is composed of several files common to all extensions. As
the details of many of those files are similar from extension to extension,
it can be laborous to duplicate the content for each one. Fortunately, there
is a script which can do all of the initial setup for you. It's called
ext_skel, and it's been distributed with PHP since 4.0.
Running ext_skel with no parameters produces this
output in PHP 5.2.2:
php-5.2.2/ext$ ./ext_skel
./ext_skel --extname=module [--proto=file] [--stubs=file] [--xml[=file]]
[--skel=dir] [--full-xml] [--no-help]
--extname=module module is the name of your extension
--proto=file file contains prototypes of functions to create
--stubs=file generate only function stubs in file
--xml generate xml documentation to be added to phpdoc-cvs
--skel=dir path to the skeleton directory
--full-xml generate xml documentation for a self-contained extension
(not yet implemented)
--no-help don't try to be nice and create comments in the code
and helper functions to test if the module compiled
Generally, when developing a new extension the only parameters you will be
interested in are
--extname and
--no-help. Unless you are already experienced with the
structure of an extension, you will
not want to use
--no-help; specifying it causes
ext_skel to leave out many helpful comments in the
files it generates.
This leaves you with --extname, which tells
ext_skel what the name of your extension is. This
"name" is an all-lowercase identifier containing only letters and
underscores which is unique among everything in the
ext/ folder of your PHP distribution.
The --proto option is intended to allow the developer to
specify a header file from which a set of PHP functions will be created,
ostensibly for the purpose of developing an extension based on a library,
but it often functions poorly with most modern header files. A test run on
the zlib.h header resulted in a very large number of
empty and nonsense prototypes in the ext_skel output
files. The --xml and --full-xml
options are entirely nonfunctional thus far. The --skel
option can be used to specify a modified set of skeleton files to work from,
a topic which is beyond the scope of this section.