I was trying to take advantage of PHP5’s new auto_prepend_file directive today, by using the php_value directive to set it in a .htaccess file. But as soon as I did that, my cheerfully running application puked and died, with the familiar message.

“Internal Server Error
The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request”

I had seen this behavior before, when I was writing an app for a client a few months ago, but I hadn’t had time to investigate it. Today I decided to go a-googling and I promptly found my answer …

Those are Apache directives, but in CGI mode Apache calls the php binary, which turn reads php.ini. Since the binary doesn’t read httpd.conf it has no effect on PHP. As PHP isn’t loaded into Apache, Apache doesn’t know what to do with the directives and borks.