Install HHVM on IBM Bluemix

Question

I have a web application on IBM Bluemix. I would like to speed up the app by precompiling the PHP by using Facebook's HHVM. How can this be done? Is this possible on Bluemix?

Thank you,

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Answer 1

Yeah this actually would be. It would be a little work to do this but with a build pack you can basically run any executable file. You would just need to bind to the port that is assigned by environment variable $PORT. Check out the Cloud Foundry Docs on implementing one. I would take a peak at the C buildpack as well.

The binary buildpack will probably be your best starting place.

You can compile your code using HHVM, I pulled out the relevant pieces from here below. This needs to be done on Ubuntu 14.04 as that is what Bluemix runs on.

Install deps:

sudo apt-get install autoconf automake binutils-dev build-essential cmake g++ gawk git \
  libboost-dev libboost-filesystem-dev libboost-program-options-dev libboost-regex-dev \
  libboost-system-dev libboost-thread-dev libboost-context-dev libbz2-dev libc-client-dev libldap2-dev \
  libc-client2007e-dev libcap-dev libcurl4-openssl-dev libdwarf-dev libelf-dev \
  libexpat-dev libgd2-xpm-dev libgoogle-glog-dev libgoogle-perftools-dev libicu-dev \
  libjemalloc-dev libmcrypt-dev libmemcached-dev libmysqlclient-dev libncurses-dev \
  libonig-dev libpcre3-dev libreadline-dev libtbb-dev libtool libxml2-dev zlib1g-dev \
  libevent-dev libmagickwand-dev libinotifytools0-dev libiconv-hook-dev libedit-dev \
  libiberty-dev libxslt1-dev ocaml-native-compilers libsqlite3-dev libyaml-dev libgmp3-dev \
  gperf libkrb5-dev libnotify-dev

Downloading the HHVM source-code:

git clone git://github.com/facebook/hhvm.git --depth=1
cd hhvm
git submodule update --init --recursive

Build HHVM:

cmake -DMYSQL_UNIX_SOCK_ADDR=/var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock .
make -j [number_of_processor_cores] # eg. make -j 4
sudo make install

The installed hhvm binary can be found in /usr/local/bin

Answer 2

That's easy to do with the built-in PHP buildpack. Simply specify a dependency on HHVM in your composer.json file, like below: { "require": { "hhvm": ">=3.5" } }