Update FreeType on DirectAdmin

In this article, AZDIGI will help you update FreeType on DirectAdmin.

I. What is FreeType?

Freethpe is a free software library to display fonts.

It is written in C, designed to be compact, effective, highly customized and flexible while capable of creating high-quality (Glyph images) of most vector and bitmap font formats.

Some products use FreeType to display fonts on the screen or paper, exclusive or partial:

• GNU/Linux and other free Unix operating systems created such as FreeBSD or NetBSD;
• iOS, Apple’s mobile operating system for iPhone and iPad;
• Android, Google’s operating system for smartphones and tablets;
• ChromeOS, Google’s operating system for laptops;
• ReactOS, a free and open-source operating system based on the best design principles found in the Windows NT architecture;
• Ghostscript, a PostScript interpreter, is used in many printers.

Only counting the products above, you will have more than a billion devices containing FreeType.

At this point, you will probably ask why we need to update FreeType on DirectAdmin?

If you do not know, PHP also uses the FreeType library for fonts. So updating FreeType on DirectAdmin will help terminals work better, display better quality fonts.

II. Update FreeType on DirectAdmin

To update FreeType on DirectAdmin, follow these 3 steps.

Step 1: SSH into your server

To update FreeType on DirectAdmin, we first need to SSH or access your VPS/server with root privileges. Or at least log in to the server with a user with sudo privileges. If you don’t know how to SSH into your VPS/Server, you can refer to the following tutorial:

• How to login to Linux VPS with SSH protocol.

After successfully SSH, we continue with step 2 to check the FreeType library version that the system is using.

Step 2: Check the FreeType library version

To check the FreeType library version, run the following command:

php -i | grep FreeType
    

Here are my results:

[root@hv10 custombuild]# php -i | grep FreeType
FreeType Support => enabled
FreeType Linkage => with freetype
FreeType Version => 2.8.0
[root@hv10 custombuild]#
    

As you can see, the FreeType library version that my system uses is version 2.8.0. At the time of writing this article, the latest FreeType version is 2.10.4. You can track the FreeType versions at the following link:

• FreeType News.

So complete the step to determine the version number in use and the latest version. We continue to step 3 to perform the FreeType update commands on DirectAdmin.

Step 3: FreeType update commands on DirectAdmin

To update FreeType on DirectAdmin, run the following commands:

cd /usr/local/directadmin/custombuild/
./build update_script
./build freetype
./build php d
    

Explanation of the above commands:

• Command 1: Move into the custombuild directory.
• Command 2: Update custombuild script script but do not download installations.
• Command 3: Update freetype.
• Command 4: Update all PHP versions on the server.

Below is an image after I update the FreeType library completely.

After you have updated the entire PHP version on the server with command 4, you can recheck the FreeType version with the following command:

php -i | grep FreeType
    

Below are my results:

[root@hv10 custombuild]# php -i | grep FreeType
FreeType Support => enabled
FreeType Linkage => with freetype
FreeType Version => 2.10.4
[root@hv10 custombuild]#
    

III. Summary

Regularly updating new versions for services on the server will help your system operate more stable and secure. Thereby helping to minimize minor errors and unintended incidents.

Hope this article will be of help to you. Wishing you success!

See more useful articles about DirectAdmin at the following link:

• Summary of instructions for using DirectAdmin.

If you need assistance, you can contact support in the ways below:

• Hotline 247: 028 888 24768 (Ext 0)
• Ticket/Email: You use the email to register for the service and send it directly to: support@azdigi.com .
• See more Hosting/VPS services here!