PHP extension is not loading when running fcgid

Question

I need to use the libpuzzle extension for PHP, and so far I failed to make it run with fcgid. I have installed it (manually, unfortunately, because of the dependency issues) and added the extension=libpuzzle.so to my /etc/php.ini. Sadly, extension only gets loaded for PHP-cli, and doesn't get loaded for PHP running from fcgid. I tried:

1. Doing service httpd restart after installation and modifying php.ini, to no avail.
2. Checking phpinfo() to see if it's loaded or not, and it isn't with fcgid, but is with CLI. Extensions that were installed via yum, like imagick, are loaded fine.
3. Loading it during runtime with dl(), however, seems like "this function has been removed from some SAPIs in PHP 5.3.".

I'm at a loss. I don't want to get rid of FastCGI because of this single extension. I cannot install extension from the repo, because one of the dependencies (maybe PHP) is different version than expected from another repo (and I cannot downgrade that either because code relies on it). Please help.

I'm running CentOS 6 with PHP 5.4.17.

Answer 1

Given how many PHP related tasks are in progress on my server, I generally use a different php.ini file for Apache/mod_fcgid...

FcgidWrapper "/usr/bin/php-cgi -c /etc/httpd/conf/php.ini" .php 

This way, all confusion as to what ini file has been parsed is removed.

Answer 2

Apparently, fcgid was configured to use the php.ini file residing in the user directory instead of the one in /etc. Adding extension=libpuzzle.so to that configuration file has resolved the problem. So, if you're having a similar issue, that can be another thing to look out for.