Env variables for plugins in PHP on Windows

Question

I am running PHP on Windows. PHP plugins on Windows are just DLL's in an extensions folder, and I can do little to configure these plugins.

For example, the ADAP plugin (which is OpenLDAP itself) has settings that I can't change on runtime. Luckily, OpenLDAP allows me to change some of these settings by messing with the environment variables. I tried setting them up on runtime by adding both:

// this apparently works on Linux
putenv('VARIABLE=value');
// tried this one as well
$_ENV['VARIABLE'] = 'value';

But that didn't work. I had to add that to Windows' environment variables (and that did work), but that's too much of a pain in the rear and will break the code when I move it. Is there a better way to do this or I'll have just to deal with it?

Thanks

Answer 1

Try to set the environment variables before the dll extension is loaded. That is, don't load the dll via php.ini, but use putenv() and afterwards dl(). Usually a DLL should share the environment variables with the main process, but you never know.

Alternatively set any required options from within .htaccess using SetEnv. This is at least portable for Apache webservers. Come to think of it, you should also try apache_setenv() if you are running mod_php and not the FastCGI version.

Btw, there have always been PHP bugs for putenv, http://bugs.php.net/50690, might be the case here.