FreeBSD 6.2 + Apache 2.2 + PHP5 + php5-recode = crash

29 Feb 2008

Today I set out to configure another simple jail, and ran into some problems when doing the usual ‘cd /usr/local/ports/lang/php5-extensions && make install’.

I had chosen quite a few extensions to install, and they were installed without any drama. The problem presented itself when starting the webserver. Apache would load the php5-module, then silently die, leaving no clues that I could find as to what had caused it. Since the only change I had made since the working install was the install of php5-extensions, I started bugtracking there.

First I deinstalled php5-extensions and all ports installed by that meta-port. Then I ran these commands in sequence over and over again until I found the guilty party:

1 2 3 4 5 6

make config – Added one more option each time make install – Installed /usr/local/bin/etc/rc.d/apache22 start && \ – Started apache top && \ – Observed if httpd stayed up /usr/local/bin/etc/rc.d/apache22 stop – Stopped the httpd-daemon make deinstall – Deinstalled

All went well until RECODE-support was enabled. Then apache failed silently. Ok, so far so good. Now what next?

Some googling later and I had learned that the order in which the php5-extensions are loaded actually matter. I located the extensions.ini-file ( /usr/local/etc/php/extensions.ini ), and changed it so that recode preceeded ‘mysql’, ‘pspell’, ’sockets’ and ‘imap’ in the list. The extensions.ini-file that worked for me is available here: extensions.ini

Please keep in mind that extensions.ini is recreated when you do a portupgrade of php5-extensions. A solution in that case can be to run a shellscript after portupgrade that reorders the file according to your needs. You can find information about one such script here: pingle.org