I have a free webspace hosted by altervista where i have one script python and one script php. What i want to do is call the python script using the php script. I googled for a solution and i found several questions about it, i tried different proposed solutions but no one worked for me.
Here the php script code:
<?php
$command = escapeshellcmd('test.py');
$output = shell_exec($command);
echo $output;
?>
and here the python script code:
print("Hello")
When i run the php script nothing happens.
What's wrong?
Thanks
Your hosting company might have disabled the shell-exec function for security reasons. I'm not saying it is the case, but you should check that first before even trying to run shell_exec.
Seealso:
PHP - How to know if server allows shell_exec
Plus, back in 2012, it wasn't possible with Altervista...
Related
Last night I spent 5.5 hours trying make PHP execute and receive the output of Virtualenv’ed Python script. Nothing worked; except for scripts that were not Virtualenv’ed.
What I am trying to do:
I am trying to make PHP call a virtualenv’d install of the Newspaper lib output text when I call it.
What I have now:
PHP: (updated)
<?php
$output = exec('newspaper2/bin/python3 /var/www/html/components/python/test.py 2>&1', $output2);
print_r(error_get_last());
echo $output2;
echo $output;
…this works when using a non-virtualenv script
Python: (updated)
from newspaper import Article
url = 'http://example.com/'
article = Article(url)
article.download()
article.html
article.parse()
article.authors
article.publish_date
string = article.text
print(string)
What the issue is:
I can run the script that PHP is running from the command line and it outputs just fine.
What I have tried:
With PHP, (I have tried all the “exec” calls for PHP) it cannot seem to open the virtual environment and returns nothing.
Before the script I have called “python3” and a few other things to no avail.
Yes, I have chmoded it to be executable…
I feel like this should be so simple.
I have tried suggestions on other posts and all over the web to no avail.
Questions:
Did I set up the virtualenv wrong?
At the top of the Python script, instead of the “#!/usr/bin/env python3” should I call something else?
If so, where do I find it? Should I start from scratch and will that
help?
Thank you for your help;
PS: I am running Ubuntu16, PHP7 and I need to use Python3
In the virtualenv'ed scripts (i.e. installed via the setuptools' entry-points), you should not touch the shebang (#!... first line). It is populated by the virtualenv & setuptools & related tools.
If you specify your own shebang, then it is not virtualenv'ed script. In that case, call python directly:
exec('/path/to/venv/bin/python3 /var/www/html/components/python/testing.py');
Alternatively, you can put the absolute path to the virtualenv's python binary to the py-script, but this does not look a good idea.
Also, remember that virtualenvs are non-relocatable. So they should stay in the path where they were created.
Also note that exec() returns only the last line of the output. You probably want shell_exec() or exec('...', $output) to get the whole output.
Also, it is unclear what happens with your script, and what is being printed on stderr. Try this command to see what is the error:
exec('/path/to/script 2>&1', $output)
#OR:
exec('/path/to/venv/bin/python3 /path/to/script 2>&1', $output)
OK, I finally figured it out and learned a lot in the process. The newspaper lib that I am using by default tries to write to the base of the users home directory. In this case, it was attempting to write to www-data, /var/www.
To fix this:
Go to the settings.py file in the newspaper library.
Edit the variable DATA_DIRECTORY = '.newspaper_scraper' and change it to DATA_DIRECTORY = '.path/to/writable/directory'
Save the file and you should be good to go.
I have no idea why it was not returning the errors that would have explained this sooner.
Hope this helps anyone else.
Thank you so much Sergey Vasilyev for your help. I appreciate it greatly.
PHP's exec() function is turned off in my hosting server and it's not possible to change it (for security reasons). Are there alternatives for the exec() function?
Here is more info about my problem:
What I want to do: I want to use .jar file in host server.
This is how it looks on my localhost:
function generateReqXML() {
exec('"C:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.7.0_21\bin\java.exe"
-jar vaiisis.jar auth', $out);
}
This .jar file help my system to generate XML code.
This code work perfect for my local machine, but its facing the problem when I am trying to use it in my host server.
Alternatives to exec are:
system(); passthru(); shell_exec();
You can check if these are available with echo ini_get("disable_functions");
But since these are probably disabled there are only non-PHP options left.
Do you have to use the exec() function via PHP?
You could for example write a shell script, which can be invoked via cron to do your job.
What are you exactly trying to accomplish?
I am trying to run a perl script from php that requires parameters to be passed to the perl script to run correctly. The following is the correct usage of the perl script from the linux terminal:
/home/user/test.pl -a alpha -b beta
or just
/home/user/test.pl -a alpha
I have execute permissions on the script and can run it without any parameters and the correct usage from the script is displayed back to my browser.
Below is the PHP code that works by displaying the usage back to my browser:
$result = shell_exec('/home/user/test.pl');
echo $result;
And the following is the problem code which I can not for the life of me figure out:
$test = $_POST['test'];
$result = shell_exec('/home/user/test.pl -a'.' '.$test);
echo $result;
Can anyone tell me what it is that I am missing to make this work correctly?
Thank you for the help.
My issue resided within the perl script itself and a specific line that was trying to output to a log file which the apache user did not have access to. I was calling the script correctly the whole time but once I was able to get to the server side logs (granted by system admin) I saw the issue was buried within the Perl script and not in php.
Well, I have to call a python script from a php one but it does nothing. I've been searching but i couldn't fix it. The script creates 2 files and writes things in the terminal.
Here's my code:
exec('/usr/local/bin/python /usr/local/script/myScript.py '.$path.' '.$specie.' '.$pvalue.');
Thank you very much.
I have a PHP website and I would like to execute a very long Python script in background (300 MB memory and 100 seconds). The process communication is done via database: when the Python script finishes its job, it updates a field in database and then the website renders some graphics, based on the results of the Python script.
I can execute "manually" the Python script from bash (any current directory) and it works. I would like to integrate it in PHP and I tried the function shell_exec:
shell_exec("python /full/path/to/my/script") but it's not working (I don't see any output)
Do you have any ideas or suggestions? It worths to mention that the python script is a wrapper over other polyglot tools (Java mixed with C++).
Thanks!
shell_exec returns a string, if you run it alone it won't produce any output, so you can write:
$output = shell_exec(...);
print $output;
First off set_time_limit(0); will make your script run for ever so timeout shouldn't be an issue. Second any *exec call in PHP does NOT use the PATH by default (might depend on configuration), so your script will exit without giving any info on the problem, and it quite often ends up being that it can't find the program, in this case python. So change it to:
shell_exec("/full/path/to/python /full/path/to/my/script");
If your python script is running on it's own without problems, then it's very likely this is the problem. As for the memory, I'm pretty sure PHP won't use the same memory python is using. So if it's using 300MB PHP should stay at default (say 1MB) and just wait for the end of shell_exec.
A proplem could be that your script takes longer than the server waiting time definied for a request (can be set in the php.ini or httpd.conf).
Another issue could be that the servers account does not have the right to execute or access code or files needed for your script to run.
Found this before and helped me solve my background execution problem:
function background_exec($command)
{
if(substr(php_uname(), 0, 7) == 'Windows')
{
pclose(popen('start "background_exec" ' . $command, 'r'));
}
else
{
exec($command . ' > /dev/null &');
}
}
Source:
http://www.warpturn.com/execute-a-background-process-on-windows-and-linux-with-php/
Thanks for your answers, but none of them worked :(. I decided to implement in a dirty way, using busy waiting, instead of triggering an event when a record is inserted.
I wrote a backup process that runs forever and at each iteration checks if there is something new in database. When it finds a record, it executes the script and everything is fine. The idea is that I launch the backup process from the shell.
I found that the issue when I tried this was the simple fact that I did not compile the source on the server I was running it on. By compiling on your local machine and then uploading to your server, it will be corrupted in some way. shell_exec() should work by compiling the source you are trying to run on the same server your are running the script.