Xdebug Error: "Failed loading xdebug.so: xdebug.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory"

Question

I recently installed xdebug on my server but restricted it's use to our test site, which uses it's own php.ini file.

For example, the test sites php.ini is located at:

/home/test_site/public_html/subdomain_name/php.ini

Inside this php.ini file I have the below for xdebug:

[XDebug]
zend_extension = /usr/local/lib/php/extensions/no-debug-non-zts-20090626/xdebug.so

xdebug.profiler_append = 0

xdebug.profiler_enable = 1

xdebug.profiler_enable_trigger = 0

xdebug.profiler_output_dir = /home/test_site/xdebug

xdebug.profiler_output_name = "cachegrind.out.%s-%u.%h_%r"

Now, the thing is, xdebug works fine, no problems.

However, on our main site, which also has it's own php.ini file, which is located for example at:

/home/main_site/public_html/php.ini

Inside this file I have nothing for xdebug in there.

Now, I recently setup a cron in cpanel for the main site such as:

php -f /home/main_site/public_html/cron_jobs/main_cron.php > /home/main_site/public_html/logs/main_cron.log 2>&1

Now, upon checking the output of the cron inside the log file I get the output:

Failed loading xdebug.so:  xdebug.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

Why am I getting this error when the main site shouldn't even be loading xdebug?

Answer 1

Even though you have the two sites split up and using two different php.ini files, CRON will still use whichever php.ini file the PHP-CLI is configured to use. So, to figure out which php.ini CRON is using, this is the command to use:

php -i | grep php.ini

If PHP-CLI happens to be using a php.ini file that you didn't expect it to be using (such as /usr/local/lib/php.ini) then that will be the key to figuring out why you're seeing Xdebug errors in the logs.

It turns out that the /usr/local/lib/php.ini file had these two values set:

extension_dir = "/usr/local/lib/php/extensions/no-debug-non-zts-20090626"
zend_extension = "xdebug.so"

That was causing the error from the php script that was run by CRON (i.e. PHP-CLI) because zend_extensions need the full path to the module. This is also stated in the Xdebug documentation: http://xdebug.org/docs/install

So, to get rid of the error, just comment out that line (or just remove it). You could also comment out or remove the extension_dir line as long as you are not loading any other modules such as:

extension = memcached.so