Recently, I tried to install Microsoft SQL Server driver for PHP on Amazon Linux and searching on how-to do was really annoying.

I read a few articles on StackOverflow and found some samples on GitHub Gists and thought of sharing on how I installed it.

Prerequisites

1. Amazon Linux 2 installed.
2. Ensure the ports 80 and 443 are open on your instance.
3. PHP >= v5.6 and the following extensions: php-devel, php-pear, php-pdo, and php-xml.
4. Know-how on using the terminal.

Installation steps

These are the commands used to install the SQL Server driver:

sudo su
sudo yum-config-manager --add-repo https://packages.microsoft.com/config/rhel/7/prod.repo
sudo yum update
sudo ACCEPT_EULA=Y yum install -y msodbcsql mssql-tools unixODBC-devel re2c gcc-c++ gcc
sudo pecl install sqlsrv
sudo pecl install pdo_sqlsrv

Modify php.ini

You can either to go to your php.ini file and add the extension=sqlsrv extension or add it like this:

echo "extension=sqlsrv" >> `php --ini | grep "Loaded Configuration" | sed -e "s|.*:\s*||"`
echo "extension=pdo_sqlsrv" >> /etc/php.d/30-pdo_sqlsrv.ini

Restart the service

Ensure that the server can connect and restart the service:

sudo setsebool -P httpd_can_network_connect_db 1
sudo systemctl restart httpd && sudo apachectl restart

Next, run the following the command to see that both pdo_sqlsrv and sqlsrv are installed:

php -m | grep "sqlsrv"`

Test if the driver works

Create a test.php file in your root directory and copy-paste this snippet to test if it works:

<?php
error_reporting(E_ALL);
ini_set('display_errors', 1);

$serverName = "YOUR_DB_HOST";
$connectionOptions = array(
    "Database" => "YOUR_DB_NAME",
    "Uid" => "YOUR_DB_USER",
    "PWD" => "YOUR_DB_PASSWORD"
);

$conn = sqlsrv_connect($serverName, $connectionOptions);

if($conn === false ) {
    print "Connected successfully."; 
} else {
    print "Error while connecting to server.";
}
?>

Hope you found this tip useful!