I recently updated my plesk server and it broke the php.ini configuration. I was working with an OSCommerce site and it was giving me all sorts of errors.

Warning: main(includes/configure.php): failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /var/www/vhosts/ocdpellets.com/httpdocs/shop/includes/application_top.php on line 28

Warning: main(includes/configure.php): failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /var/www/vhosts/ocdpellets.com/httpdocs/shop/includes/application_top.php on line 28

Fatal error: main(): Failed opening required ‘includes/configure.php’ (include_path=’\’) in /var/www/vhosts/ocdpellets.com/httpdocs/shop/includes/application_top.php on line 28

Notice the “(include_path=’\’)” part. The line in the php.ini config file was blank (“include_path=\”) so it wasn’t able to handle the require(), require_once(), and include() functions with relative paths. The correct setting is “include_path=.:/php/includes:/usr/share/php”. Since my server is in its several hour long update process, a temporary patch was to set this in the .htaccess file in the root of the website.

php_value include_path “.:/php/includes:/usr/share/php”