Encrypting A PHP File?

[Trigs]

How do people encrypt PHP files?

[Iszak]

With something like ioncube or zend guard but these aren't free. So maybe look into obfuscation?

[Trigs]

How does encryption and obfuscation work?

[MrCraig]

encryption is where the file is made completely uneditable by the user by changing the code into a special code in which a special program has to be installed on the server to read. (these are zend, ioncube)

obfuscation is when the script is base64 encoded (often also with a cipher) and is decoded and ran through php.
Users can easily retrieve source code obfuscated however encryption is impossible to retrieve.

[iUnknown]

I recommend encoding with ioncube. You can either buy the software or it's $0.50 per file to encode (minimum spend of $5).

[Iszak]

obfuscation doesn't have to be base64 or cipher, what it really means is to make the code hard to understand - sure there is base64 and cipher but there's also programs that rename functions and variables to obscue names so they're hard to interept.

Then you've got the fact that both of these have their pros and cons, for one not all servers have the decoder installed to decode the files. Secondly using an encrypter will increase the processing time. And so on, you might want to do some research into it.