Session: ZipArchive class is required and your PHP does not appear to have it.

[Claus]

Hello people

When trying to install a module via a ZIP-file I am getting the following error:

Session: ZipArchive class is required and your PHP does not appear to have it.

I don't understand why this happens! I have the latest and greatest PHP 5.6.9 and path to the extensions is correct, and the Zip-extension should be built-in (since 5.3.0 I think).

I'm only encountering this on a OpenSUSE Tumbleweed box, where I have php5-devel installed. My check_php.php file show that the Zip and Zlib listed under 'Modules'.

What to do?

[Claus]

Aha! Solved it, so I'm going to answer my own question in case someone else runs into this.

The PHP must be compiled with the option ZIP to *really* have it "built-in". In the case of this OpenSUSE build, it is not, and must instead be installed using PECL. Initially the PECL install didn't seem to work, eg. `sudo pecl install zip`, until I realized that it needed the path too `sudo pecl install pecl/zip`, but then it worked.

[RSA]

I came across this too and it helped to upgrade the PHP-Version from PHP5.3 to PHP5.4 (where the zip-Module already is included)

[szabesz]

I'm also struck by this issue and currently clueless.

I have a MAMP Pro setup, lots of ProcessWire sites and all of them can download and unzip Modules from the directory except one, which is a ProcessWire 3.0.83 site I recently started to work with.

There are no other notable differences. Same environment, similar setup and the main difference is that any ProcessWire sites prior to version 3.0.83 can unzip the modules, this problematic one running PW 3.0.83 cannot. Note that on my production server the very same site (its clone) can actually unzip the files so it must be something about my local environment but it is hard to tell what to look for when all other sites can do it.

Any ideas on how to fix it are appreciated

[FrancisChung]

Have you tried upgrading one of the working sites to 3.0.83 and tried unzipping, just to be 100% sure it is 3.0.83 that is causing it?

[szabesz]

13 minutes ago, FrancisChung said:

Have you tried upgrading one of the working sites to 3.0.83 and tried unzipping, just to be 100% sure it is 3.0.83 that is causing it?

No I did not but just to make sure: I've just upgraded one site to PW 3.0.83 and it makes no difference. I had another idea and set the admin theme to Default from UIkit and this time it worked! Afterwards I set it back to UIkit and it started to work with this admin theme as well. Weird ...

Anyway, thanks for the tip!

[szabesz]

I'm still having this issue, because a few hours later PW cannot unzip the module files but this time on the production server  I tried switching the admin themes back and forth but it did not help. It is hard to analyze such inconsistent behavior. Other sites are not affected, not even on the production server. Only this 3.0.83 instance is the problematic one.

[FrancisChung]

I have some subtle issues between my dev environment (OS/X) and my production environments (Unix Hosted). I always suspected the subtle difference between the 2 file systems (1 is semi strict on spelling, the other is super strict) that could be a potential contributor. Have you looked out for any subtle spelling mistakes, case changes or encoding changes that could be contributing to this?

[szabesz]

6 minutes ago, FrancisChung said:

I always suspected the subtle difference

Me too but in this case somehow it "got fixed" in my dev environment and soon after that stopped working in production. This type of seemingly inconsistent behavior is what I hate tracking down. Maybe some permission issues and the error message is just simply misleading, I dunno. I'll wait for PW 3.0.85 and see what happens when I upgrade. It's not a critical issue in the case of this site so I'm trying not waste a lot of time dealing with it.

[erikvanberkum]

I had the same issue after an upgrade from php 7.0 to 7.2, its a matter of php missing a library:

sudo apt-get install php7.x-zip

apache2ctl restart