PHP's PECL extension (for HttpRequest) worked on website but not command line (CLI)?

I'm running PHP on my Mac under nginx and FastCGI... and that's great and fine. I used Macports to set that all up.

Well, Macs have PHP in another, default location: /usr/bin/php, not Macport's /opt/local/bin/php. When I installed the PECL extensions using Macports (after installing PHP), it installed them to the PHP at /opt/local/bin/php, not /usr/bin/php.

I have a PHP script that makes HTTP requests, and it may be a long process, so I spin up PHP on the command-line to do it in the background. Took me forever to figure out that that PHP binary was different from the one used by nginx when I loaded up my dev site.

The CLI version of PHP which I was running for this didn't have PECL installed. A quick, dirty way to fix this:

1. sudo mv /usr/bin/php /usr/bin/php.bak
2. sudo ls -s /opt/local/bin/php /usr/bin/php

That's right! Make php a symlink! Why? Well, I'm not sure. I tried simply doing the "mv" to kind of "hide" the binary from sh, but it was giving me "php - command not found" errors, even though /opt/local/bin is was in the PATH. Why didn't it look there? I have no idea. I'm not very proficient with unix stuff. But the symlink was enough to trick it and it's working great now.