Every time I upgrade PHP in cpanel, or double-check a hosting environment, I end up back on the WordPress hosting handbook’s required extensions page. But, it’s a bit awkward to quickly reference, and it’s missing a couple of things that I have found some plugins require.
So I made this list… Alphabetical, all in one place, short description for each. I’m mostly posting this so future-me can find it again.
- apcu – In-memory key-value store for PHP
- bc – Arbitrary precision mathematics
- curl – Performs remote request operations
- dom – Validates Text Widget content, auto-configures IIS7+
- exif – Works with metadata stored in images
- fileinfo – Detects MIME types of file uploads
- filter – Securely filters user input
- ftp – Client access to files servers via FTP
- hash – Used for hashing, including passwords and update packages
- iconv – Converts between character sets
- igbinary – Drop-in replacement for the standard PHP serializer
- image – GD Graphics Library fallback for image manipulation
- imagick – Better image quality for media uploads
- intl – Locale-aware operations (formatting, transliteration, etc.)
- json – Communications with other servers, JSON data processing
- mbstring – Properly handles UTF8 text
- mysqlnd – Connects to MySQL/MariaDB
- nd_mysqli
- nd_pdo_mysql
- opcache – Stores precompiled PHP bytecode
- openssl – SSL-based connections to other hosts
- pcre – Regular expression engine used throughout PHP and WordPress
- pdo – Database access abstraction layer; some plugins need it directly rather than mysqli
- shmop – Read, write, create and delete Unix shared memory segments
- simplexml – XML parsing
- sockets – Low-level BSD socket communication interface
- sodium – Validates signatures, provides securely random bytes
- ssh2 – Secure remote shell, exec, tunnelling, file transfer
- timezonedb – Timezone database for PHP’s date/time functions
- xml – XML parsing
- xmlreader – XML parsing
- zip – Decompressing plugins, themes, and WordPress update packages
- zlib – Gzip compression and decompression
Bookmarking this one for next time.
