OPCache, Flarum & Validation of Timestamps

duman

Hello flarum community or the desperate Google researcher friend, today I faced a very unique problem.
Which was caused on my end, due to OPCache.

Error booting Flarum: Class AntoineFr\Money\Listeners\LoadSettingsFromDatabase does not exist

Installing any extension threw the error above. (Obviously different class name for different extensions.) After some mad research, and help of @jordanjay29 figured it out why.

Our friendly neighbourhood OPCache was causing the issue!
I had the opcache.validate_timestamps=0 line in my /etc/php.ini file.

This basically says the server that it should cache everything, and NEVER check if there are any changes. Naturally installing new extensions indeed did install them. However, since OPCache was set in a way to ignore changes it never knew what changed.

So just decided to throw Class ... does not exists in my face.
To fix this make sure that you don't validate timestamps forever, or simply remove it completely so that it never caches anything. (Recommended for usage of Flarum.)

I hope that it helps someone in the future.

Best,
Duman

luceos

duman an alternative way would be to reload (or restart) php-fpm or apache. This kills running processes too.

duman

luceos yes, but think about doing systemctl restart php-fpm and httpd every single time you change something related to PHP. Nightmare fuel. D:

luceos

duman reload is the non-killing variant of restart 😉 It helps working locally on changes, previewing them and then deploying them to the production server.