Edit php.ini nginx on Ubuntu 18.04 to increase max_input_vars

You are close - as you mentioned, you are probably editing the wrong php.ini file. In this case, “cli” stands for “command line interface” so when you SSH into your droplet and run a php command, it will reference that .ini for its settings.

What you need is the .ini file that nginx is referencing. Do you have a /etc/php/7.2/fpm/php.ini file? If so, that’s likely the one you need to edit.

After editing it, you’ll probably only need to restart the php fpm service, not nginx (although it doesn’t hurt to do that too).

If you don’t have that file and cannot find the php.ini on the file system, you might be able to see it on a wordpress admin system information page (or plugin) or you could make your own temporary php script with phpinfo(); in it - that will display location of the current .ini file in use.

good luck and let us know how it is going

So, when you run php on the commandline its only going to report back information about the cli version of PHP. The version that is used by the website is a different file and ini.

Let’s back up a moment… did you create a 1-Click Wordpress droplet via the DigitalOcean marketplace? Or did you create a LEMP droplet and then manually install Wordpress on there? I ask because the 1-click uses Apache, not Nginx so some instructions will be different.

If you did the 1-click or are not sure, please see if you have this file:

/etc/php/7.2/apache2/php.ini

If you do have this file, make your changes and then restart apache2:

sudo service apache2 restart

If you do not have this file, try the following command - it will list all the directories and then you can copy / paste it here so we can see what is available:

Run this command:

ls -lah /etc/php/7.2

You should see something like this:

# ls -lah /etc/php/7.2/
total 20K
drwxr-xr-x 5 root root 4.0K Aug 16 13:50 .
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4.0K Aug 16 13:50 ..
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4.0K Aug 16 13:51 apache2
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4.0K Aug 16 13:51 cli
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4.0K Aug 16 13:51 mods-available

If you are not using apache2, please share the results of the ls command so we can see what other php.ini files might be in use.

Thanks and good luck!

Sorry, I’m not familiar with easyengine.io - it looks like it installs wordpress on a docker container on your droplet? If so, the container configuration files will be separate from your droplet’s configuration, eg, it can run nginx and php inside the container and the conf and ini files are also inside the container.

If you followed the video tutorial including the easyengine or ee steps then you will need to edit the php.ini file on the container.

An example of someone else trying to do the same can be found here on the easyengine support forum:

https://community.easyengine.io/t/unable-to-edit-php-ini-file/11543

It’s a combination of docker commands and the normal commands you’d use to edit a text file.

Check those out and let us know if you need help progressing further! :)