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WordPress note: Curl != Curl

Gah. The world of PHP modules is a horrid mess. And sites going OAuth-compulsory are highlighting of late just how much so…

I just had a plugin fail, with no error message, even though I had it all installed correctly, and all pre-requisites.

After much messing about (much wasted time), it turns out that this plugin needs:

  1. libcurl (which is not the same as curl)
  2. php5-libcurl (which is not the same as libcurl)

So … when a WP module claims it needs “curl”, it could mean any of three things. I knew about the first two, but not the third. Even if it says it needs “libcurl” that’s still not specific enough.

In this case, the WP module embedded a 3rd-party OAuth module that used “the other libcurl” – so it needed *both* of them. Ha!