I was running through a helpful DigitalOcean guide on getting multiple PHP-FPM versions configured on a Debian installation. Nothing too complex, but I’m usually doing this on RedHat derivatives so I appreciated the hand-holding. At the end of it the PHP-FPM service stubbornly refused to start correctly and I encountered an error that I hadn’t seen before:
1 | Jun 01 19:45:07 XXXXXXX systemd[22426]: php7.2-fpm.service: Failed at step EXEC spawning /usr/lib/php/php-fpm-socket-helper: No such file or directory |
Sure enough, no such file. Googling the error didn’t turn up much. More surprisingly I tried using apt-file to identify the provider of the file, and came up empty. I ran across a very old page that suggested php-common (a version-independent package) might provide the file. That package was already installed, but outdated, so I updated it…and the file was created and PHP-FPM was working again.
The sequence was odd. I went back to apt-file, which still didn’t recognize the file and, what’s more, doesn’t list it when you run apt-file list php-common:
1 | php-common: /etc/cron.d/php |
That’s odd, because dpkg -L does:
1 | /etc |
Leaving aside that dpkg shows the directory hierarchy, there are noteworthy differences and I’m not sure what to make of them, or how php-common got into such a weird state.