Custom php.ini per-directory (for testing sites)

Question

I\'m running Apache 2.26, on Windows 7 with PHP 5.39 mod_ssl/2.2.6 OpenSSL/0.9.8g .

PHP works fine, so does Apache.

However, I want to try and create custom

Answer 1

Many times you might feel that you require a different settings for different sites (running on the same server) as specified in php.ini . So you start making changes in your php files using ini_set() or .htaccess to override those settings. In this howto, I will tell you how to solve this problem of having different php settings by having separate php.ini files for each website.

So, lets assume that I have a website with document root as /var/www/html/example/ with domain as www.example.com. For testing purpose you can create a small file in /var/www/html/example/phpinfo.php

Now run http://example.com/phpinfo.php it will display current php settings.

Now copy the php.ini file from /etc/php.ini file to your /var/www/html/example.

[root]# cp /etc/php.ini /var/www/html/example #For fedora users

[chia]$ sudo cp /etc/php5/apache2/php.ini /var/www/example # for Debian and Ubuntu

And now, we just need a simple trick to tell apache where to find the php settings for this website. You need to make this small change in the configuration file.

ServerName example.com

ServerAlias www.example.com

PHPINIDir /var/www/html/example

PHPINIDir should be the directory where the file php.ini resides.

Restart the apache after this

[root]# service httpd restart # for Fedora/Redhat/CenOS based systems

[chia]$ sudo apache2 restart # for Debian/Ubuntu based systems