Unable to Start PHP App Server on Apple M1 MacBook

[rainsoftware]

Dear Cubiclesoft,

I hope this issue finds you well. I'm reaching out regarding a critical issue reported by our Senior DevOps Engineer, Elliot Clover, who's been working with our PHP app named Nexus that's been packaged by PHP-app-server. Elliot encountered the following error message on an Apple M1 MacBook running the latest update:

Unable to start the web server portion of Nexus. Contact the developer of the application. Error 104

This issue is hindering the smooth operation of the app on the specified environment.
the app won't load the contents of the /www/ folder and only produces the aforementioned error message and closes.

Environment:
Operating System: macOS Ventura 13.3.1 on Apple M1 MacBook
PHP Version: 8

Regards,
Logan Flagg
Devops engineer
Rainsoftware LLC's Dusk & Rain Studios

[cubiclesoft]

I've been incredibly busy for the past two years on a new software project but only somehow just now saw this issue. Not sure how that happened. It should have been in my GitHub notifications but I don't recall ever seeing this issue show up there so it got missed. Sorry about that. Pinging me on Discord would have been useful.

That particular error message comes from the startup sequence. Error 104 indicates that the server portion failed to start for some reason. You'll have to manually run the server on the target system to figure out why.

Apple no longer includes PHP on their hardware. I ran into that issue a couple of years ago. I'm pretty sure PHP App Server uses PHP-FPM on Mac OSX with a custom php.ini generated at runtime. It's possible that the PHP-FPM FCGI route no longer works as intended on newer OSX and I also became aware recently of new Gatekeeper changes coming down the pipeline in the latest OSX. My experience is that Apple likes to break things spectacularly and I'm of the opinion that Apple also actively dislikes software developers. Also, the Intel Mac mini that I have is slow as molasses, so only rarely gets turned on - good enough for occasionally testing ideas on the Terminal but not much else. I primarily run Windows and Linux and periodically test stuff on Mac OSX and Android and extremely rarely test on iOS.

I'm sitting on a plethora of changes for my software products that will all get committed upstream once my current project reaches completion.