Loading extensions in php5-fpm

Question

I am in the process of experimenting with Zephir on my Nginx/php5-fpm/ubuntu14.04 setup. I followed their tutorial and managed to compile my first Zephir PHP extension with little difficulty. However, when I tried to enable the newly built extension by editing /etc/php5/fpm/php.ini to include

extension=/path/to/test.so

did not show up the test extension upon issuing php -m. I then remembered that to install the mcrypt extension I use php5enmod mcrypt. So I went to /etc/php5/mods-available and created the file test.ini

extension=/path/to/test.so

and then issued a

php5enmod test

A simple

service php5-fpm restart && php -m

later and lo & behold the test extension was present! All very good but I still do not understand how php5enmod does its magic. It clearly is not writing to the php.ini file. I'd be much obliged to anyone who might be able to explain.

Answer 1

php5enmod simply creates a symlink from the usual conf.d (for example: /etc/php5/fpm/conf.d) directoy to point to where the real files are in mods-available, prefixed with a number that indicates the priority (default: 20) of the module.

Answer 2

I inadvertently ran php5enmod without sudo. The error messages is interesting:

rolf@two:/etc/php5$ php5enmod curl
ln: failed to create symbolic link '/etc/php5/fpm/conf.d/20-curl.ini': Permission denied
rm: cannot remove '/var/lib/php5/modules/fpm/disabled_by_maint/curl': Permission denied