PHP Suddenly stop searching for files in current directory

Question

So I came up against something really strange today.

I've updated my PHP APC to the latest version and restarted apache. And then suddenly all scripts in apache starting complaining about not being able to find required files.

I would usually have:

require_once 'Abstract.php'

considering that Abstract.php is on the same directory as the other script.

The errors where:

PHP Warning: require_once(Abstract.php) [function.require-once]: failed to open stream: No such file or directory in data.php on line 411 PHP Fatal error: require_once() [function.require]: Failed opening required 'Abstract.php' (include_path='/var/www/application/../library:/var/www/library:.:/usr/share/php:/usr/share/pear') in data.php on line 411

As you can see the current directory (.) is included in the include_path of the execution. Why did this happen? Has anyone seen it before?

try tapping the apache process using strace and see what it does exactly (grep for "open"). — Milan Babuškov, May 12 '11 at 08:43
Are the 'read' rights correct for the Apache user trying to access the data.php file? — Bart Vangeneugden, May 12 '11 at 08:45
What happens if you `require_once dirname( __FILE__ ) . '/Abstract.php';` ? — cwallenpoole, May 12 '11 at 08:45
(As a side note: The current directory should always be a part of the include path) — cwallenpoole, May 12 '11 at 08:46
I'ts an APC bug. http://pecl.php.net/bugs/bug.php?id=22687 ... — mobius, May 12 '11 at 13:00
If you've found an answer, please add it as an answer to this question (even if it is your question) and mark the question as answered. — cwallenpoole, May 13 '11 at 03:26
@cwallenpoole I know, but I was not allowed to add an answer to my own question. I tried and had to wait 8 hours. I will add it now. — mobius, May 13 '11 at 07:20

score 1 · Answer 1 · edited May 23 '17 at 11:55

AFAIK, the . denotes the directory where the PHP binary resides. require* and include* functions take into account the current working directory, which can be modified via chdir().

As was suggested by cwallenpoole, try using the __DIR__ constant:

require_once __DIR__ . '/Abstract.php';

If that also fails, it means there's a misconfiguration elsewhere. If it works, it probably means the current executing PHP thread has its working directory set to a different and you need to either change the current working directory or modify the require statements to use absolute paths.

Also, have you considered using an autoload callback? That way you have a single point of entry for searching for classes.

score 0 · Accepted Answer · answered May 13 '11 at 07:22

Ok, I figured it out eventually and though I should share in case anyone else gets in the same trouble as me.

I used to have APC 3.0.x and upgraded to 3.1.8. As it seems APC on 3.1.8 has a bug that breaks include/requires of PHP.

See relative link here: http://pecl.php.net/bugs/bug.php?id=22687

Thanks everyone for the quick feedback :)

PHP Suddenly stop searching for files in current directory

2 Answers2