PHP FastCGI SAPI: Reloading PHP Configuration

fastcgiPHPspawn-fcgi

I am using PHP FastCGI SAPI on my web hosting environment to run PHP applications. To spawn FCGI processes I use spawn-fcgi helper program. My problem is whenever I make a change to php.ini file, I have to kill and respawn each FastCGI server for the new configuration to take effect.

Is there a way to reload PHP configuration(ie. php.ini directives) without respawning each FastCGI server? I try sending hangup signal (ie. kill -HUP PHPCGIPID) to the servers but this will result in termination of the servers.

Best Answer

As far as I know, PHP's FastCGI interpreter doesn't react to signals like HUP, USR1 or USR2 to reload its configuration.

Maybe PHP-FPM could help you to achieve what you want. On the downside, it requires patching PHP.

Related Solutions

Php – What Apache/PHP configurations do you know and how good are they

Running PHP via FastCGI will certainly give you the most flexibility. Not only can you safely use an mpm-worker Apache, you can even use another webserver altogether (e.g. nginx).

But even when staying with Apache, "PHP via FastCGI" is at the moment not one option, but at least two: mod_fastcgi, mod_fcgid. On top of that, you can either use dynamic, static, or external FastCGI processes; with or without suexec. And then there's PHP's internal FastCGI process manager, which is now replaced by the very nice PHP-FPM in PHP 5.3. All those options have different pros and cons and can lead to different problems.

Given the choice, I would pick mod_fastcgi with PHP-FPM at the moment, mostly because it allows for extremely versatile and stable setups.

Centos – configuring FastCGI on CentOS with PHP

Turn on EPEL repo:

 rpm -Uvh http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/epel/5/x86_64/epel-release-5-4.noarch.rpm

then install spawn-fcgi:

 yum install spawn-fcgi

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Php – What Apache/PHP configurations do you know and how good are they

Centos – configuring FastCGI on CentOS with PHP

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