Codeigniter Command line error - PHP Fatal error: Class 'CI_Controller' not found

Question

After following the user guide instructions found here: http://ellislab.com/codeigniter/user-guide/general/cli.html I'm unable to run the test script via command line.

My controller located at /var/www/mysite/application/controllers/

    class Tools extends CI_Controller {

    public function message($to = 'World')
    {
        echo "Hello {$to}!".PHP_EOL;
    }
}

In my browser I can access

http://mysite/tools/message/ben

And the function correctly outputs "Hello ben"

From terminal I should be able to run:

$ php index.php tools message "Ben"

My terminal should print: "Hello Ben"

However I get the following error:

PHP Fatal error: Class 'CI_Controller' not found in /var/www/mysite/system/core/CodeIgniter.php on line 233

My server is pretty standard; ubuntu LAMP. Codeigniter is pretty standard too and I have no problem running non CI scripts via command line

My PHP binary is only located in /usr/bin/php <-- This post suggests an issue running CI directly from usr/bin/php, however I'm not operating a shared PHP service, and I don't see why this would make a difference to how PHP executes a CI script.

Any help or just an indication on how to debug this would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Solved! (partly) the issue was CodeIgniters error logging.

In application/config/config.php, I modified the following config property:

$config['log_threshold'] = 0;

This disables logging, and allows $ php index.php to execute.

If anyone can explain why CI only shows this error on CLI PHP - might help anyone else who has this issue and needs it resolved with error logging on.

Answer 2

To solve error "Class 'CI_Controller' not found" try going to Application -> Config -> database.php then check the database details like hostname, username, password and database.

Answer 3

To Mijahn:

I had this same problem, and after about two hours of tracing through code to figure out the problem, it seems that there is some sort of conflict with loading the CI_Controller when utilizing the native PHP load_class function.

I worked around this issue by making the following changes to the Common.php file (hack, I know).

//$_log =& load_class('Log');
require_once('system/libraries/Log.php');
$_log = new CI_Log();

My logs then where created exactly like I wanted. Hope this hack helps.