PHP: Class XsltProcessor not found

A PHP install on Debian 5 by default does not include the Xslt extension which means the following error will occur if trying to use the XsltProcessor class: " Fatal error: Class 'XsltProcessor' not found...". This post shows how to install the extension on Debian 5.

The error message

If you run the following code:

$xslt = new XsltProcessor();

and get the following error message:

Fatal error: Class 'XsltProcessor' not found in /path/to/script.php on line XYZ

then then XSLT extension is not installed.

Install the XSLT extension on Debian

Run the following command, ether as root or using sudo:

apt-get install php5-xsl

You'll see some stuff along the lines of this:

Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
The following NEW packages will be installed:
  php5-xsl
0 upgraded, 1 newly installed, 0 to remove and 12 not upgraded.
Need to get 12.8kB of archives.
After this operation, 81.9kB of additional disk space will be used.
Get:1 http://ftp.nz.debian.org lenny/main php5-xsl 5.2.6.dfsg.1-1+lenny3 [12.8kB]
Fetched 12.8kB in 0s (47.4kB/s)
Selecting previously deselected package php5-xsl.
(Reading database ... 48949 files and directories currently installed.)
Unpacking php5-xsl (from .../php5-xsl_5.2.6.dfsg.1-1+lenny3_i386.deb) ...
Setting up php5-xsl (5.2.6.dfsg.1-1+lenny3) ...

At which point it is installed. Apache still needs to be reloaded in order to get access to the extension's functions, and this can be done with a graceful restart like so, again running the command either as root or using sudo:

/usr/sbin/apache2ctl graceful