PHP doesn't save to files - php

Question

I have Apache 2 and PHP installed on a Raspberry Pi 1 B+ (RASPBIAN STRETCH LITE
). I have a website running on it with a textbox and a PHP script that is supposed to save the contents of the textbox to a text file on the server when the user submits.
I tryed basically everything but the php script just wont save.
PHP does get the textbox-content (I tested it - it works just fine).
This is my PHP:
<?php
include "code/multiPage/topBar.html";
$dir = "/data/searches.txt";
if ($_REQUEST) {
$input = $_REQUEST["search"];
file_put_contents($dir, $input, FILE_APPEND);
}
?>
PHP is working properly aside from this problem.
The folder has read-write permissions for everyone.
I have also tryed to let PHP create its own folder with code similar to this:
if (!file_exists('path/to/directory')) {
mkdir('path/to/directory', 0777, true);
}
PHP can't even do that.
Thanks in advance for any help!

Answer 1

I figured it out. The problem was that the webserver didn't have permission to write to the directory. problem solved by running sudo chown -R www-data var/www/html/data thanks for the help! Have a nice day :D

Answer 2

First just try this separately from other code
<?php
file_put_contents("/data/searches.txt", "bla", FILE_APPEND);
?>
if it's not working try to get a last error
echo print_r( error_get_last ( ), true)
In order to make sure that you can write to the file you can always check if it's writable
if(is_writable($dir))
Also for debugging it's nice to see how much bites was written by file_put_contents
so the final code easy to debug will be like this:
<?php
include "code/multiPage/topBar.html";
$dir = "/data/searches.txt";
if(!is_writable($dir)){
echo "cannot write to file";
}
if (!empty($_REQUEST["search"])) {
$input = $_REQUEST["search"];
$bitecount = file_put_contents($dir, $input, FILE_APPEND);
}
echo $bitecount . " bites were written to the file";
?>
There is a thing. If $_REQUEST["search"]="" or $_REQUEST["search"]=null the if($_REQUEST) will be TRUE anyway