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Aspell 0.60.3 for Win32

At work I wanted to get Aspell working with PHP on our Windows servers. Unfortunately, the Windows Aspell port hasn’t been updated in nearly three years. It’s all open source so I thought, “Self, how hard can it be to compile and provide for others to have?”

Download Aspell 0.60.3

• Windows installer - (new) .exe file with en-US dictionary (must install to “C:\Program Files\”)
• .zip file - with en-US dictionary (must install to “C:\Aspell”)

Short version: I got it working, and you can download it from me if you’d like. (No guarantees about anything, though.) It took a lot of tinkering with makefiles, build environments, and so forth… the details are below (including how I actually got it working with PHP 5 on IIS).

Usage (for .zip file version)

Unzip the contents of the download onto the root of your C:\.

The path, unfortunately, is hard coded into the binary. The --enable-win32-relocatable option is currently not working in the Aspell sources.

I would have chosen C:\Program Files\ as the default install path, but the space in the path name gave me trouble. Update Seth got it working by using C:\Progra~1\Aspell for the installer version.

All of your dictionary files should go into C:\Aspell\data. The en-US dictionary is included in the .zip. If people are interested I can build other dictionaries as well.

That’s it! Add C:\Aspell\bin to your PATH environment variable if you want to be able to run it anywhere. Otherwise, test the binary by typing aspell dump dicts from the command line.

Config Files

The aspell.conf file in the \bin directory should actually be placed into a `C:\Aspell\etc directory. The binary will look for that file and adjust its options accordingly.

The included aspell.conf file was created by running aspell config > aspell.conf.

Building Aspell on Win32

I used minGW (default install), ActivePerl (latest version) and MSYS-1.0.10.

Download links

• minGW
• ActivePerl
• MSys

Build Tweaks

To get aspell to compile, I had to

• install Perl on my local machine
• run this from the MSys environment

./configure CXXFLAGS='-O2 -mno-cygwin' --enable-win32-relocatable --disable-rpath --prefix="C:/Aspell" --enable-data-dir="C:/Aspell/data" --enable-dict-dir="C:/Aspell/data"

• add a line to file_util.cpp under the “#ifdef WIN32″ section

#include "asc_ctype.hpp"

• Change the DEFAULT_INCLUDES line in the master Makefile

DEFAULT_INCLUDES = -I. -I$(srcdir) -I$(top_builddir)/gen -I$(top_builddir)/interfaces/cc -I$(top_builddir)/modules/speller/default

• run make

When compilation fails, replace the LDFLAGS = line with

LDFLAGS = common/.libs/*.o

When it fails again, reset it to

LDFLAGS =

• run make install

Packaging

I then downloaded the latest en-US dictionary, and ran ./configure; make; make install.

The contents of this file are the contents of the created install directory.

I don’t include any .reg files to register the .dlls in this package. Look at the ones from the 0.50.3 installer if you’d like to see what they did.

Help Request: 0.50.3 had a nifty windows installer and (probably) wasn’t limited in its install path location. Care to help me out here?

Aspell with PHP5 and IIS

It took several false starts to get it working as a PHP extension, but finally managed by trial and error.

1. Copy the libaspell-15.dll from the /bin directory to your /php directory.
2. Rename libaspell-15.dll to copy it to /php/aspell-15.dll.
3. Add the line ext=php_pspell.dll to the extensions section of your php.ini. The php_pspell.dll file should live in your /php/ext/ directory. If it’s not there you may have to also download the collection of PECL modules for your PHP version. It is essentially a pspell wrapper (what PHP expects) to the aspell library.
4. Restart IIS.

Getting it working with DokuWiki

Why doesn’t it work with DokuWiki’s spellcheck function? It continued to fail on the proc_open() function call in the Aspell.php class.

Solution: the default web user needs read/execute rights to cmd.exe in your \Windows\System32 directory. (Yes, that’s a bit of a security issue, but it seems there’s no way around it.) Seems this is a known issue with any of the exec() commands in PHP on Win32 platforms.

Once I gave it the appropriate permissions, the spell check worked! (See my writeup on getting Aspell working with PHP.)