Today I had some trouble getting libxml to work in PHP. I was compiling PHP 5.3.10 for a client’s Joomla site and it needs libxml. The issue seemed to be commonly happening to many people and I came across a number of forum threads on the topic.

The suggestions mostly hover around installing libxml2 development package. This can be done in Debian or Ubuntu by:

apt-get install libxml2 libxml2-dev

On other Linux distributions you may try libxml2-devel

But I had already done that and still libxml was not showing up in PHP. I had the —with-libxml-dir setting in ./configure with no luck.

Then I came across the —enable-libxml setting, which although is not mentioned directly in the ./configure --help, it should have come to my mind. This is how you enable (or disable with —disable) any module from the ext/ directory. Anyway, I found it mentioned here and that worked! The reason for this is because I had —disable-all option set. So all default modules were off, and I had to enable libxml with its enable option.

Hope this helps someone else…