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Running php and apache on termux

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This was my experience getting php and apache to run on termux

apt update && apt upgrade -y

apt install php-apache

I was following an old blog post that used php 7 and got these errors

Can't locate API module structure `php7_module' in file /data/data/com.termux/files/usr/libexec/apache2/libphp.so: undefined symbol: php7_module

Cannot load /data/data/com.termux/files/usr/libexec/apache2/libphp7.so

Corrected in apache config file

vim $PREFIX/etc/apache2/httpd.conf

LoadModule php_module /data/data/com.termux/files/usr/libexec/apache2/libphp.so

Apache is running a threaded MPM, but your PHP Module is not compiled to be threadsafe.  You need to recompile PHP.

Comment out mpm_worker and use mpm_prefork

#LoadModule mpm_worker_module libexec/apache2/mod_mpm_worker.so
LoadModule mpm_prefork_module libexec/apache2/mod_mpm_prefork.so

This still does not work as apache (httpd) was failing silently. According to Chatty LoadModule php_module ...libphp.so often fails in Termux because mod_php is incompatible or unstable with Android builds, so PHP-FPM is used instead since it’s decoupled, stable, and works via FastCGI.

But php-fpm was giving this error at first

Fri May 15 15:04:09 2026 (29777): Error Cannot create lock - Permission denied (13)

vim $PREFIX/etc/php-fpm.conf

[global]
error_log = /data/data/com.termux/files/usr/var/log/php-fpm.log

include=$PREFIX/etc/php-fpm.d/*.conf

mkdir -p $PREFIX/etc/php-fpm.d
vim $PREFIX/etc/php-fpm.d/www.conf

#substitute whoami, should look like u0_aNNN where NNN is a 3 digit number

[www]

user = whoami
group = whoami

listen = 127.0.0.1:9000

pm = dynamic
pm.max_children = 5
pm.start_servers = 1
pm.min_spare_servers = 1
pm.max_spare_servers = 2

; Disable OPcache here (IMPORTANT)
php_admin_value[opcache.enable] = 0
php_admin_value[opcache.enable_cli] = 0

And finally the command that works because I also had to force disable opcache from the command line

php-fpm -y $PREFIX/etc/php-fpm.conf -d opcache.enable=0 -d opcache.enable_cli=0

And I can test it out here from bash

php -r '
$h=["127.0.0.1","localhost","::1"];
foreach($h as $x){
  $s=@fsockopen($x,9000);
  echo "$x => ";
  var_dump($s);
}
'

This is how you can configure apache to use php-fpm

LoadModule proxy_module libexec/apache2/mod_proxy.so
LoadModule proxy_fcgi_module libexec/apache2/mod_proxy
_fcgi.so
#<FilesMatch \.php$>
 # SetHandler application/x-httpd-php                 #</FilesMatch>
<FilesMatch \.php$>                                       SetHandler "proxy:fcgi://127.0.0.1:9000"
</FilesMatch>

This is just a test dev environment so a minimal/starter config was used. A proper config is needed for the real world. Also a rooted phone might not get the opcache error.
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