How to execute a shell script in PHP

Question

I have a script in  var www myscript sh which creates folders and runs the command svn update for my projects  I need to execute this script by calling it in a PHP file in the browser  i e  Localhost test php   I tried using functions shell exec   and exec   but those did not work  I ran my shell script in terminal with su www-data  amp  amp    myscript sh and it worked  What else am I missing   lt  php  output   shell exec  quot   myscript sh quot      gt    Update 5 4 2011  I added www-data ALL  ALL  NOPASSWD ALL to  etc sudoers and it works  but this is very insecure  Is there another way to do this

User · Answer

Residuum did provide a correct answer to how you should get shell exec to find your script, but in regards to security, there are a couple of points.

I would imagine you don't want your shell script to be in your web root, as it would be visible to anyone with web access to your server.

I would recommend moving the shell script to outside of the webroot

    <?php
      $tempFolder = '/tmp';
      $webRootFolder = '/var/www';
      $scriptName = 'myscript.sh';
      $moveCommand = "mv $webRootFolder/$scriptName $tempFolder/$scriptName";
      $output = shell_exec($moveCommand);
    ?>

In regards to the:

i added www-data ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD:ALL to /etc/sudoers works

You can modify this to only cover the specific commands in your script which require sudo. Otherwise, if none of the commands in your sh script require sudo to execute, you don't need to do this at all anyway.

Try running the script as the apache user (use the su command to switch to the apache user) and if you are not prompted for sudo or given permission denied, etc, it'll be fine.

ie:

sudo su apache (or www-data)
cd /var/www
sh ./myscript

Also... what brought me here was that I wanted to run a multi line shell script using commands that are dynamically generated. I wanted all of my commands to run in the same shell, which won't happen using multiple calls to shell_exec(). The answer to that one is to do it like Jenkins - create your dynamically generated multi line of commands, put it in a variable, save it to a file in a temp folder, execute that file (using shell_exec in() php as Jenkins is Java), then do whatever you want with the output, and delete the temp file

... voila

User · Answer

You might have disabled the exec privileges  most of the LAMP packages have those disabled  Check your php ini for this line    disable functions   exec   And remove the exec  shell exec entries if there are there   Good Luck

User · Answer

Several possibilities    You have safe mode enabled  That way  only exec   is working  and then only on executables in safe mode exec dir  exec and shell exec are disabled in php ini The path to the executable is wrong  If the script is in the same directory as the php file  try exec dirname   FILE        myscript sh

User · Answer

If you are having a small script that you need to run  I simply needed to copy a file   I found it much easier to call the commands on the PHP script by calling   exec  sudo cp  tmp testfile1  var www html testfile2      and enabling such transaction by editing  or rather adding  a permitting line to the sudoers by first calling sudo visudo and adding the following line to the very end of it  www-data ALL  ALL  NOPASSWD  bin cp  tmp testfile1  var www html testfile2   All I wanted to do was to copy a file and I have been having problems with doing so because of the root password problem  and as you mentioned I did NOT want to expose the system to have no password for all root transactions

[php] How to execute a shell script in PHP?

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