Force Ubuntu to identify LAMP php installation

manpreet Best Answer 2 years ago

I have installed LAMP in my ubuntu environment (16.04) which has apache, php (7.0.9), mysql...

Although the php functionality is there, when i type 'php -v' in the terminal, i get the message

The program 'php' can be found in the following packages 
* php7.0-cli 
* hhvm

which as i understand means that ubuntu does not recognise the php installation from LAMP .

Is there a way to tell ubuntu that there is a php installation in opt/lamp... in order to recognise it?

manpreet 2 years ago

The message you see is triggered by a shell function called command_not_found_handle defined in your system wide bashrc (/etc/bash.bashrc). This function is called by the bash when you enter the name of a binary which is not found in the current PATH. On Ubuntu, this uses a tool called command-not-found to search your input against a package database and suggest a package that might contain the command you entered.

Depending on how you installed your LAMP stack - by using apt-get a lot or unblobbing a big tar file - there are two answers to your question.

In case you did apt-get all the stack applications you just did not install the php-cli package. In that case you can do sudo apt-get install php7.0-cli and you are fine.

In your question you mention /opt/lamp which suggests that you did the unblob-a-tar thing. This means that you should have a php cli binary somewhere in a bin directory under your /opt/lamp. What you can do is

1. Call it using an absolute path, i.e. /opt/lamp/bin/php -v: this is perfect if you call it only now and then
2. You can add a symlink into your bin folder, i.e ln -s /opt/lamp/bin/php /usr/bin/php: helpful if the LAMP version is the only version in your system and you use it regulary
3. Add the path of the bin folder to your PATH environment: you might use this if the LAMP is an integral part of your system

bin/php is just an example here - your actual binary might be in a different directory under a different name. Replace it with the correct path once you found it.

If you install a full binary package in /opt it might be a good idea to check if it and if so how it uses libraries that exist in your core system. You can do this by issuing ldd /opt/lamp/bin/php and check the paths of the libs that are printed. Sometimes you get into trouble when those binaries still use your system libs but expect different versions.