The old iBase PHP driver for Firebird and, by tradition, InterBase 6, has languished for several years for lack of a developer to maintain it. It barely supports PHP 6 and has some bugs with PHP 7.

Revival 2019

Martin Koeditz
Martin Koeditz,
developer
In 2019, the role of fixer and maintainer is in the process of being taken up by Martin Koeditz, with a set of bug fixes to do initially and then a longer period of catch-up. Martin is already well-known to German-speaking afficionados of Firebird, through his activities as a translator of the Firebird documentation and the support forum he manages for German speakers.
Seed funding to support the revival has been made available, if needed, by the company KIMData GmbH

News

2020-08-13 Added support for the boolean data type. Beta version is available at download section.
2019-12-01 New PHP Driver Page https://github.com/FirebirdSQL/php-firebird
2019-06-07 Linux test kit was updated to address some incompatibilities.
2019-05-31 Added PHP extension for 64 bit Linux for testing (link below).
2019-05-16 Experimental versions of the PHP Interbase / Firebird driver with fixed bugs #72175 as described in https://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=72175. Volker Rehn has tested versions in 32 and 64 bit and reported no problem. Linux builds will follow shortly.
Note, it is not the official PHP driver. Our own dedicated Firebird driver is under development, with test builds expected soon.
 
2019-05-06 In 2019, the PHP community decided to remove the PHP driver "ibase" from the kernel and outsource it to the PECL repository. With this step, we want to orient ourselves as the driver progresses primarily to the needs of the Firebird community.

The move of the driver is currently not completed. Once this happens we will provide links and instructions for downloading and compiling the PHP driver.

PHP Links

Articles

  • Lester Caine has pulled together a series of links to articles about using Firebird with the various PHP stacks over many years. (Scroll down to the list of search results.)
  • An on-line test using various Firebird commands with the older driver (use password masterkey to connect)