PHP - Failed to open stream No such file or directory

Question

In PHP scripts  whether calling include    require    fopen    or their derivatives such as include once  require once  or even  move uploaded file    one often runs into an error or warning       Failed to open stream   No such file or directory    What is a good process to quickly find the root cause of the problem

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The following PHP settings in php ini if set to non-existent directory can also raise  PHP Warning  Unknown  failed to open stream  Permission denied in Unknown on line 0  sys temp dir upload tmp dir session save path

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For me I got this error because I was trying to read a file which required HTTP auth  with a username and password  Hope that helps others  Might be another corner case

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There are many reasons why one might run into this error and thus a good checklist of what to check first helps considerably   Let s consider that we are troubleshooting the following line   require   path to file      Checklist    1  Check the file path for typos   either check manually  by visually checking the path  or move whatever is called by require  or include  to its own variable  echo it  copy it  and try accessing it from a terminal    path     path to file    echo  Path    path    require   path     Then  in a terminal   cat  lt file path pasted gt       2  Check that the file path is correct regarding relative vs absolute path considerations   if it is starting by a forward slash     then it is not referring to the root of your website s folder  the document root   but to the root of your server    for example  your website s directory might be  users tony htdocs  if it is not starting by a forward slash then it is either relying on the include path  see below  or the path is relative  If it is relative  then PHP will calculate relatively to the path of the current working directory    thus  not relative to the path of your web site s root  or to the file where you are typing for that reason  always use absolute file paths    Best practices    In order to make your script robust in case you move things around  while still generating an absolute path at runtime  you have 2 options     use require   DIR       relative path from current file   The   DIR   magic constant returns the directory of the current file  define a SITE ROOT constant yourself     at the root of your web site s directory  create a file  e g  config php in config php  write  define  SITE ROOT     DIR      in every file where you want to reference the site root folder  include config php  and then use the SITE ROOT constant wherever you like    require once   DIR        config php       require once SITE ROOT   other file php       These 2 practices also make your application more portable because it does not rely on ini settings like the include path     3  Check your include path  Another way to include files  neither relatively nor purely absolutely  is to rely on the include path  This is often the case for libraries or frameworks such as the Zend framework   Such an inclusion will look like this    include  Zend Mail Protocol Imap php    In that case  you will want to make sure that the folder where  Zend  is  is part of the include path   You can check the include path with    echo get include path      You can add a folder to it with    set include path get include path         path to new folder        4  Check that your server has access to that file  It might be that all together  the user running the server process  Apache or PHP  simply doesn t have permission to read from or write to that file   To check under what user the server is running you can use posix getpwuid     user   posix getpwuid posix geteuid      var dump  user     To find out the permissions on the file  type the following command in the terminal   ls -l  lt path to file gt    and look at permission symbolic notation    5  Check PHP settings  If none of the above worked  then the issue is probably that some PHP settings forbid it to access that file   Three settings could be relevant     open basedir   If this is set PHP won t be able to access any file outside of the specified directory  not even through a symbolic link   However  the default behavior is for it not to be set in which case there is no restriction This can be checked by either calling phpinfo   or by using ini get  open basedir   You can change the setting either by editing your php ini file or your httpd conf file  safe mode   if this is turned on restrictions might apply  However  this has been removed in PHP 5 4  If you are still on a version that supports safe mode upgrade to a PHP version that is still being supported   allow url fopen and allow url include   this applies only to including or opening files through a network process such as http    not when trying to include files on the local file system this can be checked with ini get  allow url include   and set with ini set  allow url include    1        Corner cases  If none of the above enabled to diagnose the problem  here are some special situations that could happen      1  The inclusion of library relying on the include path  It can happen that you include a library  for example  the Zend framework  using a relative or absolute path  For example    require   usr share php libzend-framework-php Zend Mail Protocol Imap php    But then you still get the same kind of error   This could happen because the file that you have  successfully  included  has itself an include statement for another file  and that second include statement assumes that you have added the path of that library to the include path   For example  the Zend framework file mentioned before could have the following include    include  Zend Mail Protocol Exception php     which is neither an inclusion by relative path  nor by absolute path  It is assuming that the Zend framework directory has been added to the include path   In such a case  the only practical solution is to add the directory to your include path     2  SELinux  If you are running Security-Enhanced Linux  then it might be the reason for the problem  by denying access to the file from the server   To check whether SELinux is enabled on your system  run the sestatus command in a terminal  If the command does not exist  then SELinux is not on your system  If it does exist  then it should tell you whether it is enforced or not   To check whether SELinux policies are the reason for the problem  you can try turning it off temporarily  However be CAREFUL  since this will disable protection entirely  Do not do this on your production server   setenforce 0   If you no longer have the problem with SELinux turned off  then this is the root cause   To solve it  you will have to configure SELinux accordingly   The following context types will be necessary     httpd sys content t for files that you want your server to be able to read httpd sys rw content t for files on which you want read and write access httpd log t for log files httpd cache t for the cache directory   For example  to assign the httpd sys content t context type to your website root directory  run    semanage fcontext -a -t httpd sys content t   path to root        restorecon -Rv  path to root   If your file is in a home directory  you will also need to turn on the httpd enable homedirs boolean    setsebool -P httpd enable homedirs 1   In any case  there could be a variety of reasons why SELinux would deny access to a file  depending on your policies  So you will need to enquire into that  Here is a tutorial specifically on configuring SELinux for a web server     3  Symfony  If you are using Symfony  and experiencing this error when uploading to a server  then it can be that the app s cache hasn t been reset  either because app cache has been uploaded  or that cache hasn t been cleared   You can test and fix this by running the following console command   cache clear     4  Non ACSII characters inside Zip file  Apparently  this error can happen also upon calling zip- gt close   when some files inside the zip have non-ASCII characters in their filename  such as        A potential solution is to wrap the file name in utf8 decode   before creating the target file   Credits to Fran Cano for identifying and suggesting a solution to this issue

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Look at the exact error   My code worked fine on all machines but only on this one started giving problem  which used to work find I guess   Used echo  document root  path to debug and also looked closely at the error  found this     Warning    include D  MyProjects testproject  functions connections php     failed to open stream    You can easily see where the problems are  The problems are    before functions   document root     SERVER  DOCUMENT ROOT    echo  root   document root   include  document root   functions connections php      So simply remove the lading   from include and it should work fine  What is interesting is this behaviors is different on different versions  I run the same code on Laptop  Macbook Pro and this PC  all worked fine untill  Hope this helps someone    Copy past the file location in the browser to make sure file exists  Sometimes files get deleted unexpectedly  happened with me  and it was also the issue in my case

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Add script with query parameters  That was my case  It actually links to question  4485874  but I m going to explain it here shortly  When you try to require path to script php parameter value  PHP looks for file named script php parameter value  because UNIX allows you to have paths like this  If you are really need to pass some data to included script  just declare it as  variable     or  GLOBALS       or other way you like

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To add to the  really good  existing answer Shared Hosting Software open basedir is one that can stump you because it can be specified in a web server configuration  While this is easily remedied if you run your own dedicated server  there are some shared hosting software packages out there  like Plesk  cPanel  etc  that will configure a configuration directive on a per-domain basis  Because the software builds the configuration file  i e  httpd conf  you cannot change that file directly because the hosting software will just overwrite it when it restarts  With Plesk  they provide a place to override the provided httpd conf called vhost conf  Only the server admin can write this file  The configuration for Apache looks something like this  lt Directory  var www vhosts domain com gt       lt IfModule mod php5 c gt          php admin flag engine on         php admin flag safe mode off         php admin value open basedir  quot  var www vhosts domain com  tmp  usr share pear  local PEAR quot       lt  IfModule gt   lt  Directory gt   Have your server admin consult the manual for the hosting and web server software they use  File Permissions It s important to note that executing a file through your web server is very different from a command line or cron job execution  The big difference is that your web server has its own user and permissions  For security reasons that user is pretty restricted  Apache  for instance  is often apache  www-data or httpd  depending on your server   A cron job or CLI execution has whatever permissions that the user running it has  i e  running a PHP script as root will execute with permissions of root   A lot of times people will solve a permissions problem by doing the following  Linux example  chmod 777  path to file  This is not a smart idea  because the file or directory is now world writable  If you own the server and are the only user then this isn t such a big deal  but if you re on a shared hosting environment you ve just given everyone on your server access  What you need to do is determine the user s  that need access and give only those them access  Once you know which users need access you ll want to make sure that  That user owns the file and possibly the parent directory  especially the parent directory if you want to write files   In most shared hosting environments this won t be an issue  because your user should own all the files underneath your root  A Linux example is shown below  chown apache apache  path to file   The user  and only that user  has access  In Linux  a good practice would be chmod 600  only owner can read and write  or chmod 644  owner can write but everyone can read    You can read a more extended discussion of Linux Unix permissions and users here

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Samba Shares  If you have a Linux test server and you work from a Windows Client  the Samba share interferes with the chmod command  So  even if you use   chmod -R 777 myfolder   on the Linux side it is fully possible that the Unix Group www-data still doesn t have write access  One working solution if your share is set up that Windows admins are mapped to root  From Windows  open the Permissions  disable Inheritance for your folder with copy  and then grant full access for www-data

[php] PHP - Failed to open stream : No such file or directory

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