The CLI php.ini is not the FPM php.ini
An hour lost to a two-megabyte upload limit that did not exist, because the value came from the wrong SAPI.
This one is embarrassing in retrospect and costs everybody an hour exactly once. Uploads were failing on a site, so the obvious first check:
$ php -r 'echo ini_get("upload_max_filesize");'
2MThere it is. Two megabytes, the ancient PHP default, obviously the problem. Raise it, restart, move on. Except uploads much larger than 2 MB had been working for months, which should have been the clue.
Two configurations, one binary
PHP reads a different config directory for each SAPI. On a Debian-family system:
/etc/php/8.3/cli/php.ini + cli/conf.d/*.ini <- php on the command line
/etc/php/8.3/fpm/php.ini + fpm/conf.d/*.ini <- everything served over HTTP
/etc/php/8.3/apache2/php.ini + apache2/conf.d/*.ini <- mod_php, if you use itYour website runs under FPM. php -r on the command line runs under CLI. They can differ by a factor of a thousand and nothing will warn you, because both are correct — they are answering about different runtimes.
Ask the runtime that actually serves the request
Drop a file in the docroot, fetch it over HTTP, delete it:
printf '<?php echo ini_get("upload_max_filesize");' > /var/www/site/_ini.php
curl -s https://example.com/_ini.php
rm /var/www/site/_ini.phpOn the server in question that returned 2048M. The limit I had spent an hour on did not exist. The upload failures were something else entirely.
curl -X POST against the real endpoint rather than calling the handler from a script — the sandbox, the user, the environment and the config all differ.The second mistake, which was worse
Having decided the limit was wrong, I ran a helper that writes PHP settings — and it replaced the file rather than merging into it. Six settings that had been configured deliberately were gone, silently, because the tool took a list of keys and wrote exactly those.
Two lessons worth more than the hour: read a config file before you write it, and when a tool takes "the settings", find out whether it means "these settings" or "all settings". Nothing in the output distinguishes the two until you diff the file afterwards.
# before touching anything
cp /etc/php/8.3/fpm/conf.d/99-local.ini{,.bak}
# after
diff /etc/php/8.3/fpm/conf.d/99-local.ini{.bak,}Alien XP
Runs the servers behind AlphaPanel and writes up what breaks.
