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Question

I get an error when trying to use artisan command tinker. For example I would like to add a user. In my terminal I type

$ php artisan tinker 

Answer 1

Sometimes pcntl functions are disabled in some distros, so you have to

Find your cli's php.ini file

php --ini

Edit it that php.ini, usually you'll have to do

sudo gedit /etc/php5/cli/php.ini

or

sudo vim /etc/php5/cli/php.ini

and comment a line that starts with

; disable_functions = pcntl_alarm,pcntl_fork,pcntl_waitpid,...

You don't really have to comment it all, you can just enable pcntl functions, by removing them from that line, but if this is a development box, you can just enable everything.

Answer 2

One or more of readline posix and pcntl extensions are missing. You need to compile PHP with the appropiate configuration options to enabled it.

Here are the instructions:

• readline http://www.php.net/manual/en/readline.installation.php
• pcntl http://www.php.net/manual/en/pcntl.installation.php
• posix http://www.php.net/manual/en/posix.installation.php

Note that posix functions are enabled by default.

Answer 3

I personally use MAMP and also rely on MAMP's version of PHP for the CLI. When I hit this issue I found that the Redline and PCNTL extensions were not part of MAMP's PHP distribution.

I wrote an article on how I fixed the problem as well as a link to download the two extensions that I had to compile from source.

http://adampatterson.ca/blog/2014/10/laravel-tinker-boris-mamp-os-x-yosemite/

Answer 4

If you are on debian like me this should work:

source: http://pkgs.org/debian-wheezy/dotdeb-i386/php5-readline_5.4.28-1~dotdeb.1_i386.deb.html

Add the following line to /etc/apt/sources.list:

deb http://packages.dotdeb.org/ wheezy all

Install GPG key of the repository:

wget http://www.dotdeb.org/dotdeb.gpg
sudo apt-key add dotdeb.gpg

Update the package index:

sudo apt-get update

Install php5-readline deb package:

sudo apt-get install php5-readline