Custom php.ini file in when executing 'php' as a shell script - php

Question

I'm running php as a shell script.
(I am not sure if "shell script" is correct. The file starts with #!/usr/bin/php.)
This works great. But the MongoDB class doesn't get loaded as the correct php.ini file (having extension=mongo.so) is not used.
How do I make it use that php.ini file?
I already tried #!/usr/bin/php -c /usr/local/lib/php.ini
But I still get the same error - Fatal error: Class 'Mongo' not found
What can be done?

Answer 1

Try putting php.ini in the same folder as the php binary. It seems to look there first.
I know this because I used a very powerful and useful command-line program called strace to show me what's really going on behind my back
$ strace -o strace.log php --version
$ grep php.ini strace.log
Strace digs out kernel (system) calls that your program makes and dumps the output into the file specified after -o
It's easy to use grep to search for occurrences of php.ini in this log. It's pretty obvious looking at the following typical response to see what is going on.
open("/usr/bin/php.ini", O_RDONLY) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
open("/etc/php.ini", O_RDONLY) = 3
lstat("/etc/php.ini", {st_mode=S_IFREG|0644, st_size=69105, ...}) = 0

Answer 2

Edit .bashrc located at your home directory and add this line:
alias php='php -c /path-to-custom/php.ini'

Answer 3

In this particular situation. I would
Check to see if the Mongo module is loaded (using extension_loaded() or class_exists())
If not loaded, try to load the Mongo module using dl()
If loading fails, display an error message so the admin can take care of it (STDERR or trigger_error()
Most distributions already ship different versions of php.ini for Web Servers and CLI. Are there other reasons to add another php.ini configuration for script XYZ (in addition to normal configuration)?

Answer 4

I came across this, because I had the same problem. Problem is there is more than one php.ini file used.
The one used by Apache is located in
/etc/php5/apache2/php.ini
This is the one that is modified to run MongoDB with extension=mongo.so.
However, when running a cron job, or from the terminal, it loads a different ini file. You can find this by using the line
grep php.ini strace.log
It is mentioned by thomas-peter.
The path where it displays '=3' is the php.ini file loaded when running the engine from the terminal, this ini file will need "extension=mongo.so" placed in it as well.

Answer 5

The other option is to use a small sh wrapper, something like this below in a myapp.sh file. Don’t forget to chmod +x on the script to run it.
#!/usr/bin/env sh
SOMEVAR='Yea Baby!'
export SOMEVAR
php -c /path/to/my/custom/php.ini /path/to/my/old_script.php
With the added bonus of being able to set or override environment variables pre-run.

Answer 6

This is a bit of a gotcha with PHP.
php -c /path/to/my/custom/php.ini works from the command line.
But try it in a script like this #!/usr/local/bin/php -c /path/to/my/custom/php.ini and your custom php won't load.
The Solution
Get rid of the space between -c and your path:
#!/usr/local/bin/php -c/path/to/my/custom/php.ini