Error 500 on GAE local dev server with Laravel and PHP 5.5

Question

I'm running Laravel on Google App Engine.

Since App Engine runs PHP using a PHP 5.5 interpreter, I specified php55 as runtime. The project runs well on Google's servers.

When I run my website on the local dev server the SDK provides using runtime: php everything works fine. Changing the runtime to php55 gives me a blank page and the following error in my log:

Unable to delete function dlUnable to delete function mb_send_mail
ERROR:root:php failure (255) with:
stdout:
Status: 500 Internal Server Error
X-Powered-By: PHP/5.5.23
Content-type: text/html   

I installed the newest version of the GAE SDK.

Of course I can run with the runtime variable set to php instead of php55, but I'm still wondering why runtime: php55 doesn't work on localhost and if I'm missing something here.

Answer 1

I'm seeing this as well on OSX running via command line. My suspicion is that this is a bug in the Google App Engine development server.

I've opened a ticket here and will gladly update this answer once something more concrete is determined:

https://code.google.com/p/googleappengine/issues/detail?id=12127