During the process of setting up a new development workstation (Kubuntu 18.10), I discovered that the php-cli
package was not installed. Nevertheless, all PHP scripts are working fine, whether they are run through the webserver or standalone (for example from cron).
I installed PHP using apt install php
. This created a php.ini
and a conf.d
directory in /etc/php/7.2/cli
. On the terminal, the path for the PHP executable is /usr/bin/php
, which links to /etc/alternatives/php
, which links to the actual binary, /usr/bin/php7.2
. The MD5-sum of this file is the same with the php-cli
package installed or removed.
I remember there used to be a time when php-cli
was required for standalone scripts, but what does it do now? Is there any point in installing it, if the php
package is already installed?