What methods are there to protect PHP scripts from being copied?

Question

PHP

Now I am making one script of a ready-made affiliate store working with the API of one service for selling everything. In the future, this script will be sold to people for a small amount. The customer wants to have protection against copying and altering this script by other people. I know about obfuscation. I tried to encode several files like this, but in the end everything stupidly stopped working. Perhaps I overdid it somewhere. There was also an idea to make a permanent monitoring of registered copies with disabling illegal ones.

Answer 1

Obfuscation doesn't help much, there's always deobfuscation that you can pull something out of. You have two options:
1) Run the script on your server and sell the ability to use your server's API
2) Compile the script to be a single module. (But this is much more complicated, and there will be problems with customers)

Answer 2

All answers above are correct.
Also, from personal experience. By doing something like that with the code, you spoil your karma a lot. Otherwise, you incur curses on yourself from those who will have to support this code of yours.

Answer 3

Forget about all this, who needs to hack, who doesn't care about it.

Answer 4

PHP is an interpretive language, there is simply no serious code copy protection.
The only way to protect your work is to sell people not a code, but a service.
Let your customer make the service "turnkey online store for rent", then no one will steal the code,... and you will provide yourself with work to refine the script for the tasks of clients :)