Some days ago I found myself on front o f a problem: my unit tests failed because of lack of PHP memory.

This were the tedious error:

PHP Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 268435456 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 16640 bytes)

As I use CodeShip.io as continuous delivery server, I had to increase the PHP memory_limit on their systems, but… how?

So I googled for a solution, but nothing helped me.

The last chance were to contact the support. As ever, the astonishing CodeShip.io’s support replied me with this email:

PHP is limited to 256MB memory by default on the build VMs (which you just barely exceeded it). But you have access to the php.ini and can configure the limit yourself. The file is located at

${HOME}/.phpenv/versions/${YOUR_PHP_VERSION}/etc/php.ini

and e.g. the following sed call would achieve increasing the limit

sed -i'' 's/^memory_limit=.*/memory_limit = 512m/g' .phpenv/versions/5.6/etc/php.ini

So, a simple line in my setup commands, increased the default php memory_limit:

sed -i'' 's/^memory_limit=.*/memory_limit = 512m/g' ${HOME}/.phpenv/versions/5.6/etc/php.ini

Remember to “Make. Ideas. Happen.”.

I wish you flocking users, see you soon!