Related
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?
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 <file path pasted>
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 <path/to/file>
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->close() when some files inside the zip have non-ASCII characters in their filename, such as "é".
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
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
<Directory /var/www/vhosts/domain.com>
<IfModule mod_php5.c>
php_admin_flag engine on
php_admin_flag safe_mode off
php_admin_value open_basedir "/var/www/vhosts/domain.com:/tmp:/usr/share/pear:/local/PEAR"
</IfModule>
</Directory>
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
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.
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.
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.
Aside from the other excellent answers, one thing I overlooked on Windows while writing a simple script: This error will be shown when trying to open a file with characters that Windows does not support in file names.
For example:
$file = fopen(date('Y-m-d_H:i:s'), 'w+');
Will give:
fopen(2022-06-01_22:53:03): Failed to open stream: No such file or directory in ...
Windows does not like : in file names, as well as a number of other characters.
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
PHP - Failed to open stream : No such file or directory in mac
For example I will upload a picture. But I am getting this error. First thing i will do right click on the image and get info.
$thePathOfMyPicture = "/Users/misstugba/Desktop/";
use with function
if(move_uploaded_file($_FILES["file"]["tmp_name"],$thePathOfMyPicture.$_FILES["file"]["name"])){
echo "image uploaded successfully";
}
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.
Edit
You can check if this type of authentication is present by inspecting the headers:
$file_headers = get_headers($url);
if (!$file_headers) echo 'File headers missing';
else if (strpos($file_headers[0], '401 Unauthorized') > -1) echo '401 Unauthorized';
In PHP, start Apache then write you DB name and password if exist in your environment(.env).
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?
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 <file path pasted>
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 <path/to/file>
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->close() when some files inside the zip have non-ASCII characters in their filename, such as "é".
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
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
<Directory /var/www/vhosts/domain.com>
<IfModule mod_php5.c>
php_admin_flag engine on
php_admin_flag safe_mode off
php_admin_value open_basedir "/var/www/vhosts/domain.com:/tmp:/usr/share/pear:/local/PEAR"
</IfModule>
</Directory>
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
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.
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.
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.
Aside from the other excellent answers, one thing I overlooked on Windows while writing a simple script: This error will be shown when trying to open a file with characters that Windows does not support in file names.
For example:
$file = fopen(date('Y-m-d_H:i:s'), 'w+');
Will give:
fopen(2022-06-01_22:53:03): Failed to open stream: No such file or directory in ...
Windows does not like : in file names, as well as a number of other characters.
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
PHP - Failed to open stream : No such file or directory in mac
For example I will upload a picture. But I am getting this error. First thing i will do right click on the image and get info.
$thePathOfMyPicture = "/Users/misstugba/Desktop/";
use with function
if(move_uploaded_file($_FILES["file"]["tmp_name"],$thePathOfMyPicture.$_FILES["file"]["name"])){
echo "image uploaded successfully";
}
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.
Edit
You can check if this type of authentication is present by inspecting the headers:
$file_headers = get_headers($url);
if (!$file_headers) echo 'File headers missing';
else if (strpos($file_headers[0], '401 Unauthorized') > -1) echo '401 Unauthorized';
In PHP, start Apache then write you DB name and password if exist in your environment(.env).
I have Ubuntu Server with lamp.
When i uploading files like xls or images it works fine, but when I trying to open it says me that the Excel file was broken. Same thing happens with images
Is it possible that php changes the file?
Permissions for /var/www/publick_html/uploads is 777
well, I know,I use windows and maybe this is extremely OFF TOPIC, but I have a simililar problem with uploaded files and my experience can be usefull for other people.
In my case, the uploaded file can not be open because it was written first in
C:\Windows\Temp
and then moved to the upload directory, but my temp folder doesn t have permission to access to it. Infact, if I click on temp folder I see:
After I clicked "Continue", the problem has been solved!
The problem was in versions of apache and php.
Version of apache was 2.2 and php was 5.4
I upgraded my apache to 2.4 version and now it works fine.
This should solve your problem with being unable to open uploaded files with PHP on SQL SERVER. It solved mine.
You may come across the following problem using PHP on Microsoft IIS: getting permission denied errors from the move_uploaded_file function even when all the folder permissions seem correct. I had to set the following to get it to work:
Write permissions on the the folder through the IIS management console.
Write permissions to IUSR_'server' in the folder's security settings.
Write permissions to "Domain Users" in the folder's security settings.
The third setting was required because my application itself lives in a secure folder - using authentication (either Basic or Windows Integrated) to identify the users. When the uploads happen IIS seems to be checking that these users have write access to the folder, not just whether the web server (IUSR_'server') has access.
Also, remember to set "Execute Permissions" to "None" in the IIS management console, so that people can't upload a script file and then run it. (Other checks of the uploaded file are recommended as well but 'Execute None' is a good start.)
reference https://www.php.net/manual/en/features.file-upload.php
This question is related to another question I wrote:
Trouble using DOTNET from PHP.
Where I was using the DOTNET() function in PHP to call a DLL I had written.
I was able to get it working fine by running php.exe example.php from the command line (with the DLL's still in the PHP folder).
I moved the php file to an IIS 7 webserver folder on the same machine (leaving the DLLs in the same php folder), but I keep getting a 500 internal service error.
I've checked the server logs (in c:\inetput\logs\ and in c:\windows\temp\php53errors) but there doesn't seem to be any relevant information about what caused the error. I even tried to change the php.ini settings to get more error feedback, but that doesn't seem to help.
I can only guess that the issue may be related to:
that php file not having the proper permissions (my dll does some file reading/writing)
php can't find the DLLs
The actual error I get is:
The FastCGI process exited unexpectedly.
Any idea on how to debug this problem?
The problem here is almost certainly related to file permissions.
When you run php.exe from the command line you run as your own logged-in user. When running a PHP script from IIS, in response to an http request, php.exe runs as a different user. Depending on your version of Windows it could be
IUSR_machine - on IIS6 and prior
IUSR on IIS7 and later
These users need permissions on the php file to be executed.
Read more about it
On IIS7 and later I use a command-line tool called icacls.exe to set the permissions on directories or files that need to be read by IIS and the processes it starts (like php.exe). This security stuff applies to all IIS applications: PHP, ASPNET, ASP-classic, Python, and so on.
IIS also needs to be able to read static files, like .htm, .js, .css, .jpog, .png files and so on. You can set the same permissions for all of them: Read and Execute.
You can grant permissions directly to the user, like this:
icacls.exe YOUR-FILE-GOES-HERE /grant "NT AUTHORITY\IUSR:(RX)"
You can also grant permissions to the group, to which IUSR belongs, like this:
icacls.exe YOUR-FILE-HERE /grant "BUILTIN\IIS_IUSRS:(RX)"
In either case you may need to stop and restart IIS after setting file-level permissions.
If your .php script reads and writes other files or directories, then the same user needs pernissions on those other files and directories. If you need the .php script to be able to delete files, then you might want
icacls.exe YOUR-FILE-HERE /grant "BUILTIN\IIS_IUSRS:(F)"
...which grants full rights to the file.
You can grant permissions on an entire directory, too, specifying that all files created in that directory in the future will inherit the file-specific permissions set on the directory. For example, set the file perms for the directory, then copy a bunch of files into it, and all the files get the permissions from the parent. Do this with the OI and CI flags (those initials stand for "object-inherit" and "container-inherit").
icacls.exe DIRECTORY /grant "BUILTIN\IIS_IUSRS:(OI)(CI)(RX)"
copy FILE1 DIRECTORY
copy FILE2 DIRECTORY
...
When I want to create a new vdir in IIS, to allow running PHP scripts, or ASPX or .JS (yes, ASP Classic) or Python or whatever, I do these steps:
appcmd.exe add app /site.name:"Default Web Site" /path:/vdirpath /physicalPath:c:\docroot
icacls.exe DIRECTORY /grant "BUILTIN\IIS_IUSRS:(OI)(CI)(RX)"
Then I drop files into the directory, and they get the proper permissions.
Setting the ACL (access control list) on the directory will not change the ACL for the files that already exist in the directory. If you want to set permissions on the files that are already in the directory, you need to use icacls.exe on the particular files. icacls accepts wildcards, and it also has a /t switch that recurses.
I have a PHP web application running on IIS, which allows a user to upload a file from a simple html form. The uploaded file is then moved to a folder on another server. This is working correctly on Apache, but fails on IIS with the error:
function['move_uploaded_file']failed to open stream: Permission denied
in...
I've checked all the permissions on the directories. If I run a simple PHP script through the command line to copy a file from the server into the folder on the other server it works correctly, so I suspect the problem is with IIS.
if (move_uploaded_file($_FILES ["file"] ["tmp_name"], "\\\\000.00.0.00\\tia\\web\\upload\\" .$_FILES["file"]["name"])) {
This has been covered already here. Quoting the reason here:
You have mapped target directory to a share such as \server2\files. These mappings are only available to the current users (eg, the admin account), not to the IUSR account that your php is probably running as (assuming IIS). Solution, don't use mappings, instead use the full 'unc' path name, ie '\server\share\folder\file.ext', also remember that the IUSR account will need access to these shares/folders/files
From what I can see in your comment, you are using a \\ prefixed network share as the target for your move_uploaded_file() operation.
I'll bet a beer that PHP isn't allowed to access that share. Remember, PHP runs with IIS's permissions!
Try saving to a local, globally writable path first. If that works, you know you have to fix the share's permissions.