Prerequisites#

Login to your Debian 9 system using shell access. For remote systems connect with SSH. Windows users can use Putty or other alternatives applications for SSH connection.

ssh root@debian9

Run below commands to upgrade the current packages to the latest version.

sudo apt update 
sudo apt upgrade

Let’s execute the following commands to install the required packages first on your system. Then import packages signing key. After that configure PPA for the PHP packages on your system.

When you’re working with Drupal 6, it’s sometimes necessary to inspect the data stored in a node’s field. This is especially useful for debugging or when you’re trying to understand the structure of the content better. One quick way to achieve this is by dumping the field contents as an array. In PHP, the var_export() function comes in handy for this purpose.

Here’s how to do it:

var_export(content_fields('field_name_of_the_field', 'name_of_the_content_type'));

In this snippet, replace 'field_name_of_the_field' with the actual name of the field you’re interested in and 'name_of_the_content_type' with the specific content type containing that field.

How to install PHP development files

If you want to run phpize on your system, you need to install the development files of PHP first. Otherwise, you might get an error message like this:

sh: phpize: not found
ERROR: `phpize' failed

To install the PHP development files on Ubuntu/Debian, you can use the following command in the terminal:

apt-get install php5-dev

That should solve the problem. 🙂