RootUsers

How can we find the default configuration files for the PHP packages in CentOS Linux?

By using the RPM command we can query a package to find all of its associated configuration files. Failing that we can use the find command to search the file system for these files, as we will see here.

Finally we’ll cover how we can use a phpinfo file to show us which configuration file is in use.

RPM Query Configuration Files

The options we will use with the RPM command are -q to query a package, and -c which will list the configuration files that are part of the package. As shown below we have run RPM with the -qc options on the php-common package, which is a dependency when installing the php package and is where the php.ini file comes from in CentOS.

[root@centos7 ~]# rpm -qc php-common
/etc/php.d/curl.ini
/etc/php.d/fileinfo.ini
/etc/php.d/json.ini
/etc/php.d/phar.ini
/etc/php.d/zip.ini
/etc/php.ini

These are all of the default configuration files that are installed by the php-common package, we can see here that by default the php.ini file is found at /etc/php.ini.

There are also a couple more configuration files from the php package.

[root@centos7 ~]# rpm -qc php
/etc/httpd/conf.d/php.conf
/etc/httpd/conf.modules.d/10-php.conf

The php package requires the httpd package to be installed, which makes sense as these are the configuration files that tell Apache how to work with PHP.

Find Command

If you aren’t using packages to install PHP and perhaps compiled it from source instead or otherwise installed to a custom location, we can easily run find over the entire file system to find these files.

[root@centos7 ~]# find / -name php.ini
/etc/php.ini

The above example will search through root file system ‘/’ and find every file named ‘php.ini’.

PHPInfo

We can create a simple phpinfo file and open it in a browser to display the location of the php.ini file that is being used. Copy the below into a .php file and navigate to it within a browser to view this information. You should delete the file once you’re done, as this can provide a lot of information to an attacker.

<?php
phpinfo();
?>

The “Configuration File (php.ini) Path” shows the directory the php.ini file can be found in, while “Loaded Configuration File” shows the full path to the file.

Summary

With these simple methods we can quickly search the file system to find all php.ini files, or simply display the php.ini file that our php file is currently making use of thanks to phpinfo.