Finding Shared Libraries

Question:

Why do I get the "mapserv: error while loading shared libraries: libXXX.so: cannot load shared object file: No such file or directory." message for a library when I run MapServer?

Answer (from Armin Burger):

1. On Linux (and possibly some other Unix platforms) you can try it with adding the line /usr/local/lib (or whichever directory libXXX.so resides in) to the file /etc/ld.so.conf and then run 'ldconfig'. This will ensure that programs can find the library regardless of their environment, even MapServer when run as a cgi.
2. You could also use:

   setenv LD_LIBRARY_PATH /usr/lib:/usr/local/lib
   

   to add the library path. Or something similar with export for bash. However, doing this for your account will not generally affect "mapserv" when run via CGI. To publish an environment variable for cgi programs via Apache you can usually put something like:

   SetEnv LD_LIBRARY_PATH /usr/local/lib:/usr/local/pgsql/lib
   

   in your Apache configuration file.