Make App Engine for PHP load BCMath or php.ini - php

Question

I'm running the latest php-cgi from Arch Linux's repos. I enabled the BCMath module on php.ini and it works when I run php, php-cgi and php in Apache. However, when dev_appserver.py runs php, somehow it loses the configuration I set in php.ini. Causing both BCMath, soap and my locale settings to not load, causing:
dev_appserver.py --php_executable_path /usr/bin/php-cgi appengine-try-php
PHPEnvironmentError: The PHP runtime requires the "bccomp" function, which is not defined.
php-cgi -i | grep -i bcmath returns BCMATH enabled.
php -i | grep -i bcmath returns BCMATH enabled.
php -r "echo bccomp('1.0001', '1', 5);" returns 1.
Is there any way to make dev_appserver.py load the module or php.ini?

Answer 1

Here's the code that fails - we check if the function exists.
if (!function_exists('bccomp')) {
echo "The PHP runtime requires the \"bccomp\" function, which is not ";
echo "defined.\n";
echo "If you built PHP using \"configure\" then please rebuild with:\n";
echo ' ./configure --enable-bcmath';
exit(1);
}
I don't know why you'd have the extension enabled but the function not existing. Probably try listing the functions that are available to double check it's there.
php -r 'print_r(get_defined_functions());' | grep -i bccomp

Answer 2

google-cloud-sdk/platform/google_appengine/google/appengine/tools/devappserver2/php/runtime.py
Supports loading a php.ini file from the project directory, as such you can just drop a php.ini file in the project directory. It will by default ignore the php.ini file in /etc/php/php.ini unlike all other instances of php. Here is the php.ini script I'm using. It likely has extra modules and modules that are missing compared to the production App Engine.
date.timezone = America/New_York
extension=bcmath.so
extension=bz2.so
extension=curl.so
extension=gd.so
extension=gettext.so
extension=mcrypt.so
extension=mysqli.so
extension=mysql.so
extension=openssl.so
extension=pdo_mysql.so
extension=soap.so
extension=zip.so
Happy Apping.