A generic data container. Used to hold file handles, database connections, or anything else that needs to be initialized and then passed around for other functions to act on. To create a resource in your extension, first declare an extension-wide true global. We don't have to worry about thread-safety here. And then if your resource holds a complex datatype of some sort, typedef it as well at the top of your .c file (on in your header file): Next we need to create a resource destructor function. ptr; efree(test_struct->name); efree(test_struct); }]]> Then in our MINIT function we declare/initialize our resource: Then we might have a function that looks like this that returns a resource: name = estrndup(name, name_len); test_struct->age = age; ZEND_REGISTER_RESOURCE(return_value, test_struct, le_test); }]]> Followed by other functions that then take a resource as an argument and do something with it: name, 1); add_assoc_long(return_value, "age", test_struct->age); }]]>