I upgraded to Ubuntu 10.04 this morning and immediately noticed I could no longer serve php applications from my home directory. When I tried to visit one of my projects, http://test.local for example, Firefox opened a download dialog with a message similar to “You have chosen to open index.phtml . . .”

After quite a bit of googling and forum searching, I went to Twitter asking for help. Many thanks to @sypherNL for helping me resolve this one.

It seems that something has changed in /etc/apache2/mods-enabled/php5.conf. If you’re experiencing this same issue, check your php5.conf and see if it matches mine.

<IfModule mod_php5.c>
    <FilesMatch "\.ph(p3?|tml)$">
        SetHandler application/x-httpd-php
    </FilesMatch>
    <FilesMatch "\.phps$">
        SetHandler application/x-httpd-php-source
    </FilesMatch>
    # To re-enable php in user directories comment the following lines
    # (from <IfModule ...> to </IfModule>.) Do NOT set it to On as it
    # prevents .htaccess files from disabling it.
    <IfModule mod_userdir.c>
        <Directory /home/*/public_html>
            php_admin_value engine Off
        </Directory>
    </IfModule>
</IfModule>

If your php5.conf file looks like the one above, simply comment out the

<IfModule mod_userdir.c>

lines as instructed. Once that’s done, restart apache with the following command:

sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 reload

Clear your browser’s cache and try to visit your site again. I didn’t think the fix took at first, but after clearing cache everything worked just fine.

Related Links

• Thanks again to @sypherNL for showing me how to resolve this one.
• Also see Marco Rodrigues’ post Your public_html with PHP5 isn’t working in Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid?