How to protect and hide PHP source code?
In the time of open-source there are multiple benefits of making your code
available to all. However when deploying or selling your PHP code to a client you
might want to protect and hide it because of different business reasons or security.
There are multiple approaches to check based on the use cases:
- Obfuscation - makes code
difficult to read by a human in order to hide its logic or purpose. In most
cases the reverse-engineering of such code is still possible so obfuscation
doesn’t provide proper code protection if you need it.
- SaaS - Software as a service
is code licensing approach where the code is accessed from a server based on
licenses and subscriptions to enabled users. Consider this kind of way if you
want to make sure that the code is not available to end-users or that it is
used only on request.
- License agreements and contracts are the usual approach to make agreements
between coders with clients.
See also
