Sunday, May 18, 2008

Debian Etch, mod_fcgid & php4

There are a fair few howto's out there with instructions on getting php4 & fcgid working together, but it seems none of them have been tested properly. PHP5 works easily following the instructions, but not PHP4 - so here's my extra notes to get it working.

I had to strace apache a few times to figure out exactly what was going on since it fcgid doesn't provide any useful logging. This can easily be done with "strace -f -p {pid_of_the_apache_process_answering_the_request} -e read=all -e write=all -o strace_output.txt" - this will give you something to look for when debugging.

The main difference between most of the existing howto's is the exec line in the php-fcgi-wrapper. Although "apt-get install php4-cgi" provides you with /usr/bin/php4-cgi - and it seems you would use this, you _don't_ use it. You need to use /usr/lib/cgi-bin/php4. You should be able to figure out the rest with the existing howto's.

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