Change version, 5.3 does not have fpm.

thanks for the correction

This bug has been fixed in SVN.

Snapshots of the sources are packaged every three hours; this change
will be in the next snapshot. You can grab the snapshot at
http://snaps.php.net/.
 
Thank you for the report, and for helping us make PHP better.

It's been commited in revision 298383

In fastcgi headers, only unique values can be passed. So you have to concatenate 
differentes value in one and 
separate them with a new line character (\n).

For exemple in nginx, it could be done this way:

  set $php_value "pcre.backtrack_limit=424242";
  set $php_value "$php_value \n pcre.recursion_limit=99999";
  fastcgi_param  PHP_VALUE $php_value;

  fastcgi_param  PHP_ADMIN_VALUE "open_basedir=/var/www/htdocs";


In lighttpd, it seems there is no options to pass custom headers :/

Hi guys, has this been sent to any stable release of PHP? I can't find it in any part of http://www.php.net/ChangeLog-5.php#5.3.7

Yes it's been integrated into FPM since 5.3.3 I think. In all the cases, it works 
with php 5.3.7

it doesn't work with nginx anf php5-cgi spawn:

nginx version: nginx/0.7.67
PHP 5.3.8-1~dotdeb.1 with Suhosin-Patch (cli) (built: Aug 26 2011 12:46:54) 

I used this line in the nginx.conf:
fastcgi_param PHP_ADMIN_VALUE open_basedir=/home/www/docs

so there was set
$_SERVER['PHP_ADMIN_VALUE']="open_basedir=/home/www/docs"

I, too, have noticed that PHP configuration directives that are defined like 
this, within an nginx "location{}" block

fastcgi_param PHP_VALUE "
    error_reporting=6143
    log_errors=On
";

are not effective. The values are propagated to the effective environment 
variables, though, as evidenced by the fact that the values appear in the 
$_SERVER["PHP_VALUE"] superglobal.

Will this ever work? Or is it simply not possible to achieve this with PHP's CGI 
executable (instead of, for example, php-fpm)?

I've been got the same problem, which I get 
$_SERVER["PHP_VALUE"] = '...'
 in php.ini when I use 
fastcgi_param PHP_ADMIN_VALUE ...
in nginx config.

I find the solution that spawn-cgi may not support this feature.
the newest updated of spawn is 1.6.3 which was published in 2009-09-23.
but we can see from this page that the feature was added in 2010-04-19 and only 
supported in php-fpm.

It is possible to pass variables in lighttpd 1.4:


setenv.add-environment += ( "PHP_VALUE" => "
    user_agent=\"ff\"
    user_ini.filename=\".php.user.ini\"
    memory_limit=\"500M\"
"
)

you need to use raw newlines to separate values and of course escape quotes for lighttpd config parser

actually, no quotes are neccessary, and single quotes work too:

setenv.add-environment += ( "PHP_VALUE" => "
    user_agent=ff2 dd
    user_ini.filename='.php.user.ini'
    memory_limit=501M
"
)

parse as:
param[user_agent]: string(6) "ff2 dd"
param[user_ini.filename]: string(14) ".php.user2.ini"
param[memory_limit]: string(4) "501M"

FYI, I was finally able to get this working on nginx by quoting and escaping the values..

fastcgi_param  PHP_ADMIN_VALUE "error_log=\"/srv/http/domain.com/logs/php.log\"";

It works fine with nginx:
fastcgi_param PHP_VALUE param1=val1

But how can I set two or more php variables?

fastcgi_param PHP_VALUE param1=val1
fastcgi_param PHP_VALUE param2=val2

does not work because 2nd line replace PHP_VALUE from the 1st line

Some security warning should be given in the FPM documentation:
if someone can upload a .htaccess in a directory and set environment variable (PHP_ADMIN_VALUE), he can easily overwrite the PHP pool configuration. I don't know if it was intended, but you must put "AllowOverride None" in your Apache configuration.
When PHP is a module of Apache it is possible to set php_value in .htaccess, but at least it is impossible to set php_admin_value. IMHO it's a security flaw in FPM.