Upgrading to 18.04 caused issue with php installation

Question

I have recently upgraded to 18.04 LTS but seems like a library is broken or missing and its remctl.so for php. Whenever running php command in CLI I get this warning.

PHP Warning:  PHP Startup: Unable to load dynamic library '/usr/lib/php/20160303/remctl.so' 
- /usr/lib/php/20160303/remctl.so: 
cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory in Unknown on line 0

Update: I installed PHP like 3 months ago when I installed ubuntu 17.01 but as soon as I heard about the LTS release of 18.04 I thought to upgrade to it. And after that I start getting warning on every command of PHP in CLI.

Solution

For repairing the damaged php installation, first remove the installed php:

sudo apt-get --purge remove php*  
sudo apt autoremove

Then, re-install the latest php (7.2 in Ubuntu 18.04):

sudo apt-get install php

If you'd like to stick to php 7.1 (as 20160303 suggests you have), you may install it from Ondřej Surý's PHP repository:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ondrej/php
sudo apt update
sudo apt-get install php-7.1

Comments

[David Foerster]

Could you please edit your question to describe how you installed PHP and if you performed the Ubuntu release upgrade before or after its installation? Thanks.

[A.Raza]

Getting this message on sudo apt-get --purge remove php* E: Unable to locate package phpunit.xml E: Couldn't find any package by glob 'phpunit.xml' E: Couldn't find any package by regex 'phpunit.xml'

[A.Raza]

Switched to php7.2 and issue seems to be gone. Seeing nice and clean CLI. Issue seems to be with 7.1 version only. Hope none of my projects will require 7.1 ;p

[valiano]

@A.Raza great, glad 7.2 is working for you. If you found the answer useful, please consider accepting it. Cheers!