Question

I’m trying to run a file with heroku run path/to/file.php and I get a reponse:

bash: path/to/file.php: Permission denied

I’ve tried chmod 755 on the file and directory, but it seems that heroku changes it back to 600… After running chmod 755 it shows 755, but then when I exit bash and then come back the permissions are reset to 600.

What am I missing?

Also some people have suggested

heroku run php path/to/file.php

but I get an error saying

bash: php: command not found

Answer 1

There are a couple of things you need to do.

• When creating the Heroku application, you have to make sure that the PHP buildpack is used. This is what will inject the PHP runtime into your application slug. Either add a index.php file (which is how PHP is detected) or hard-code it like this: heroku config:add BUILDPACK_URL=https://github.com/heroku/heroku-buildpack-php.git
• Set the library path as detailed in this question: heroku config:add LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/app/php/ext:/app/apache/lib
• Run your stuff: heroku run ./php/bin/php --version

To sum up:

heroku config:add BUILDPACK_URL=https://github.com/heroku/heroku-buildpack-php.git
heroku config:add LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/app/php/ext:/app/apache/lib
heroku run ./php/bin/php --version

A useful way to debug this is to bash into the running Heroku dyno: heroku run bash. That will let you poke around, see where things are at and experiment.