Search | Running | Sailfish OS | All Posts | About Me

Fixing Baikal not working anymore after upgrading to FreeBSD 15

February 14, 2026 — Nico Cartron

Context

(As usual, putting that here mostly for me, but might be useful for others!)

I recently upgraded my servers to FreeBSD 15, and as part of it, I reinstalled all the packages. Everything worked well, apart from Baikal whose virtual host would refuse to work.

Upon checking my Apache logs, I saw:

Got error 'PHP message: PHP Fatal error: Uncaught Error: Call to undefined function Flake\\session_status() in Core/Frameworks/Flake/Framework.php:201

Investigating

I checked PHP and FPM and I had sessions installed/enabled.

Only after actually restarting php_fpm would that error message disappear... but only to have a new one: Baikal complaining about not being able to connect to the MySQL database.

And fixing it!

Manually connecting through CLI to MySQL worked fine, so I knew that was more on the Baikal / web server side.

I checked whether the MySQL PHP package was installed, and indeed it was not!
So after throwing a:

pkg install php84-pdo_mysql-8.4.16

and restarting Apache, would Baikal be back again!


Tags: BSD


I don't have any commenting system, but email me (nicolas at ncartron dot org) your comments!
If you like my work, you can buy me a coffee!