Question

Got a LAMP setup (as per Remy Sharp’s set up) on OSX Snow Leopard, PHP 5.3

A site I am trying to run locally is built in CodeIgniter and utilises PEAR which until now I have not used locally.

I downloaded it but it seems that my local environment doe snot know where to look for PEAR.

• which pear: /usr/bin/pear
• which php: /usr/bin/php

my php.ini file has:
include_path=”.:/usr/bin/pear

But for some reason I am just getting an error:
Message: require_once(Date.php):

even though Date.php has been installed in Pear

Any thoughts?

Answer 1

Ha! I’ve played this game across the years on Tiger, Panther, Leopard…

It’s a lesson in frustration if you choose to go down this path–whatever you fix could be trashed the next time Apple wants to rename the /etc/httpd direcotry /etc/apache2. Then I just gave up. My advice is to not use the built in Mac Lamp stack, but to turn off Web sharing in the System Preferences and download and install MAMP or Zend server.

MAMP is configured with everything inside the MAMP.app package, mysql, php (with most pear/pecl libs you need), and apache. It also comes with a util to start/stop your servers.

Now….

If you must go down the route of not using something like MAMP/Zend Server, I’m assuming somewhere your include path is being overwritten.

Somewhere before the error, but after the framework is loaded, try this:

echo get_include_path();

See if you’re path still is what you set in the INI file. If not, mischief is going on. Usual places to check:

• .htaccess file in docroot of site
• config files for your framework–they love to overwrite logging and path ini settings!
• Somewhere in your code someone is calling set_include_path(‘/some/path’) or ini_set(‘include_path’, ‘/some/path’)