I have a legacy CakePHP(1.3.13) app, running on Ubuntu server 16.04, on apache. It is using php 5.6. I'm trying to migrate the app to a development server, also Ubuntu 16.04, but running php 7.2.
On the production machine, php file(s) are being executed even before line 1 of index.php in the app I'm trying to migrate. On the dev box, this isn't happening.
I've sudo tar'ed the entire web server tree, and sudo untar'ed it on the dev box. I've copied the apache site configs, and only edited them for hostnames.
I don't understand why apache is running one or many php files PRIOR to running index.php on the production box. It is apparently loading a custom configuration php file, that sets up some global variable, but for the life of me I can't figure out why this is happening. I'm sure I'm just missing something dumb.
Greg Schmidt nailed it. There was a second auto_prepend_file=MagicallyExecutingScript.php in the php.ini.