I have a php script that is currently invoked directly by a webhook. The webhook method was fine up until this past week where the volume of requests is becoming problematic for API rate limits.
What I have been trying to do is make a second PHP file ($path/webhook-receiver.php) to be invoked by webhooks only when there isn't a process running. I'll be using the process user webb recommended, which is in the invoked script ($path/event-finance-reporting.php) it will create a file as the first action, and the delete that file as the last exection.
Before invoking the script the automation will check the directory to make sure it is empty, otherwise it will kick back an error to the user telling them to wait until the current job is completed before submitting another one.
The problem I'm running into now is that both $command1 and $command2'. both end up invoking the$path/webhook-reciever.phpinstead of$path/event-finance-reporting.php`.
$command1 = "php -f $path/event-finance-reporting.php 123456789";
$command2 = "/usr/bin/php -q -f $path/event-finance-reporting.php 123456789";
Anyone know why would be?
The goal it to have only one instance of event-finance-reporting.php run at a time. One strategy is to create a unique lockfile, don't run if it exists, and delete it when it finishes, e.g.,:
$lockfilepath = '.../event-finance-reporting.lock';
if(file_exists($lockfilepath)){
print("try again later");
exit();
}
touch($lockfilepath);
...
// event-finance-reporting.php code
...
unlink($lockfilepath);
You could also do something more complicated in the if, such as checking the age of the lockfile, then deleting and ignoring it if it was left behind awhile ago by a crashed instance of event-finance-reporting.php.
With this strategy, you also don't need two separate phps.
Related
I have a script that is running continuously in the server, in this case a PHP script, like:
php path/to/my/index.php.
It's been executed, and when it's done, it's executed again, and again, forever.
I'm looking for the best way to be notified if that event stop running(been executed).
There are many reasons why it stops been called, like server memory, new deployment, human error... etc.
I just want to be notified(email, sms, slack...) if that script was not executed for certain amount of time(like 1 hour, 1 day, etc...)
My server is Ubuntu living in AWS.
An idea:
I was thinking on having an index in REDIS/MEMCACHED/ETC with a TTL. Every time the script run, renovate that TTL for this index.
If the script stop working for that TTL time, this index will expire. I just need a way to trigger a notification when that expiration happen, but looks like REDIS/MEMCACHED are not prepared for that
register_shutdown_function might help, but might not... https://www.php.net/manual/en/function.register-shutdown-function.php
I can't say i've ever seen a script that needs to run indefinitely in PHP. Perhaps there is another way to solve the problem you are after?
Update - Following your redis idea, I'd look at keyspace notifications. https://redis.io/topics/notifications
I've not tested the idea since I'm not actually a redis user. But it may be possible to subscribe to capture the expiration event (perhaps from another server?) and generate your notification.
There's no 'best' way to do this. Ultimately, what works best will boil down to the specific workflow you're supporting.
tl;dr version: Find what constitutes success and record the most recent time it happened. Use that for your notification trigger in another script.
Long version:
That said, persistent storage with a separate watcher is probably the most straight-forward way to do this. Record the last successful run, and then check it with a cron job every so often.
For what it's worth, for scripts like this I generally monitor exit codes or logs produced by the script in question. This isolates the error notification process from the script itself so a flaw in the script (hopefully) doesn't hamper the notification.
For a barebones example, say we have a script to invoke the actual script... (This is very much untested pseudo-code)
<?php
//Run and record.
exec("php path/to/my/index.php", $output, $return_code);
//$return_code will be 255 on fatal errors. You can use other return codes
//with exit in your called script to report other fail states.
if($return_code == 0) {
file_put_contents('/path/to/folder/last_success.txt', time());
} else {
file_put_contents('/path/to/folder/error_report.json', json_encode([
'return_code' => $return_code,
'time' => time(),
'output' => implode("\n", $output),
//assuming here that error output isn't silently logged somewhere already.
], JSON_PRETTY_PRINT));
}
And then a watcher.php that monitors these files on a cron job.
<?php
//Notify us immediately on failure maybe?
//If you have a lot of transient failures it may make more sense to
//aggregate and them in a single report at a specific time instead.
if(is_file('/path/to/folder/error_report.json')) {
//Mail details stored in JSON here.
//rename file so it's recorded, but we don't receive it again.
rename('/path/to/folder/error_report.json', '/path/to/folder/error_report.json'.'-sent-'.date('Y-m-d-H-i-s'));
} else {
if(is_file('/path/to/folder/last_success.txt')) {
$last_success = intval(file_get_contents('/path/to/folder/last_success.txt'));
if(strtotime('-24 hours') > $last_success) {
//Our script hasn't run in 24 hours, let someone know.
}
} else {
//No successful run recorded. Might want to put code here if that's unexpected.
}
}
Notes: There are some caveats to the specific approach displayed above. A script can fail in a non-fatal way and if you're not checking for it this example could record that as a successful run. For example, permissions errors causing warnings but the script still runs it's full course and exits normally without hitting an exit call with a specific return code. Our example invoker here would log that as a successful run - even though it isn't.
Another option is to log success from your script and only check for error exits from the invoker.
The main reason is because I don't want to hold up the current PHP process. I want users to be able to navigate around during the script execution.
The script in question (importer.php) updates a txt file with a percentage as it completes, javascript intercepts this txt file and outputs the percentage using a timer every 5 seconds to keep the user updated (all in the form of a load bar).
I've been able to launch the script like so:
$cmd = '"C:\/path\/to\/v5.4\/php" importer.php';
pclose(popen($cmd, "r"));
exit;
This runs the script, but hangs the current process until importer.php completes. Is there a way to get out of the current process and launch this using another one instead?
I read that using & at the end of the cmd tells the script to not wait, but I believe this is a *nix command and since I'm running on a Windows box, I can't use it... unless perhaps there is an alternative for Windows?
According to the documentation at http://php.net/passthru you should be able to execute your command using that, as long as you redirect your output.
$cmd = '"C:\/path\/to\/v5.4\/php" importer.php';
// Use passthrough here, and redirect the output to a temp textfile.
passthru($cmd . '>%TEMP%\importerOutput.txt');
exit;
I was able to resolve this issue by using a WshShell Object; WScript.Shell
$WshShell = new COM("WScript.Shell");
$WshShell->Run('"C:\/path\/to\/v5.4\/php-win.exe" -f "C:\/path\/to\/code\/snippet\/importer.php" var1 var2 var3', 0, false);
Note: I have spaces in my file structure so I needed to add quotes around the paths to the files. I was also able to pass variables, var1, var2, and var3. I've also used \/ to escape my slashes.
I'll break the Run array down a bit for my case:
The first; is the command you want to run (path to php, path to script, and variables to pass).
The second; 0 - Hides the window and activates another window (link below for more options).
The third; false - Boolean value indicating whether the script should wait for the program to finish executing before continuing to the next statement in your script. If set to true, script execution halts until the program finishes.
For more information on WScript.Shell visit http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/d5fk67ky(v=vs.84).aspx for details.
Hope this helps someone else!
I'm trying to create a browser-started self-calling/repeating PHP script on Windows with PHP (currently 5.3.24 but soon will be latest). It will act as a daemon to monitor changes in a database (every few seconds, so cron/schedule is out) and then call other PHP scripts to perform work when changes are found. For the purposes of this question please ignore the fact that I'd be better off doing this in C# or some other language :)
To keep things simple I started out by trying to use popen to run a second PHP script in the background...
// BatchMonitor.php
SaveToMonitorTable(1); // save 1st test entry to see if the script reached this point
$Command = '"" "C:\Program Files (x86)\PHP\v5.3\php.exe" C:\inetpub\wwwroot\Test.php --Instance=' . $Data->Instance;
pclose(popen("start /B $Command", "r"));
SaveToMonitorTable(2); // save 2nd test entry to see if the script reached this point
exit();
// Test.php
SaveToTestTable(1);
Sleep(10);
SaveToTestTable(2);
exit();
If I run BatchMonitor.php in the browser it works fine. As expected it will save 1 to the monitor table, call Test.php which saves 1 to the test table, the original BatchMonitor.php will continue without waiting for a response and save 2 to the monitor table before exiting, then 10 seconds later the test page saves 2 to the test table before exiting. The second script starts fine, the first script does not wait for a reply and all parameters are correctly passed between scripts. With everything working as intended I then changed the system to work as a repeating loop by calling itself (with delay) instead of another script...
// BatchMonitor.php
SaveToMonitorTable(1); // save 1st test entry to see if the script reached this point
$Command = '"" "C:\Program Files (x86)\PHP\v5.3\php.exe" C:\inetpub\wwwroot\BatchMonitor.php --Instance=' . $Data->Instance;
pclose(popen("start /B $Command", "r"));
SaveToMonitorTable(2); // save 2nd test entry to see if the script reached this point
exit();
If I run BatchMonitor.php in the browser it runs once and that is it. It will save 1 to the database, wait 10 seconds and then save 2 to the database before exiting. The page returns successfully with no script or PHP errors but it doesn't repeat as it should.
Both BatchMonitor.php and Test.php use line-for-line identical functions to get the parameters and both files run correctly and identical on the first iteration. If I use exec instead of popen then the page loops correctly with all logic working as expected (with the one obvious flaw of creating a never-ending chain of scripts awaiting for response values that will never come).
Am I missing something obvious? Does popen have some sort of secret rule that prevents a page/process from opening duplicates of itself? Are there any alternatives to using popen or exec? I read about WScript.Shell but it might be a while before I can schedule that to get enabled so for now it's not an option and I'm hoping there is something more standard that I can use.
I dont feel like this should cbe your actual answer, But why do you disbandon scheduled tasks/cronjobs because you want something done every X seconds? Having the script minute.php calling 5seconds.php with ofcouse 5 second intervals in between would create a repeated taak evert 5 seconds right?
Strangely enough you are kinda using the same sort of mechanism from your browser already.
My only concern would be to take the processed time in account and create a safe script which ensures no more than 1 '5seconds.php' can run at any given time.
I've been completely unsuccessful finding an answer to this question. Hopefully someone here can help.
I have a PHP script (a WordPress template, to be specific) that automatically imports and processes images when a user hits it. The problem is that the image processing takes up a lot of memory, particularly if multiple users are accessing the template at the same time and initiating the image processing. My server crashed multiple times because of this.
My solution to this was to not execute the image-processing function if it was already running. Before the function started running, I would check a database entry named image_import_running to see if it was set to false. If it was, the function then ran. The very first thing the function did was set image_import_running to true. Then, after it was all finished, I set it back to false.
It worked great -- in theory. The site hasn't crashed since, I can tell you that. But there are two major problems with it:
If the user closes the page while it's loading, the script never finishes processing the images and therefore never sets image_import_running back to false. The template will never process images again until it's manually set to false.
If the script times out while it's processing images -- and that's a strong possibility if there are many images in the queue -- you have essentially the same problem as No. 1: the script never gets to the point where it sets image_import_running back to false.
To handle No. 1 (the first one of the two problems I realized), I added ignore_user_abort(true) to the script. Did it work? I don't know, because No. 2 is still an issue. That's where I'm stumped.
If I could ask the server whether the script was running or not, I could do something like this:
if($import_running && $script_not_running) {
$import_running = false;
}
But how do I set that $script_not_running variable? Beats me.
I've shared this entire story with you just in case you have some other brilliant solution.
Try using
ignore_user_abort(true); it will continue to run even if the person leaves and closes the browser.
you might also want to put a number instead of true false in the db record and set a maximum number of processes that can run together
As others have suggested, it would be best to move the image processing out of the request itself.
As an interim "fix", store a timestamp alongside image_import_running when a processing job begins (e.g., image_import_commenced). This is a very crude mechanism, but if you know the maximum time that a job can run before timing out, the script can check whether that period of time has elapsed.
e.g., if image_import_running is still true but the current time is more than 10 minutes since image_import_commenced, run the processing anyway.
What about setting a transient with an expiry time that would throttle the operation?
if(!get_transient( 'import_running' )) {
set_transient( 'import_running', true, 30 ); // set a 30 second transient on the import.
run_the_import_function();
}
I would rather store the job into database flagging it pending and set a cron job to execute the processing one job at a time.
For Me i use just this simple idea with a text document. for example run.txt file
in the top script use :
if((file_get_contents('run.txt') != 'run'){ // here the script will work
$file = fopen('run.txt', 'w+');
fwrite($file, 'run');
fclose('run.txt');
}else{
exit(); // if it find 'run' in run.txt the script will stop
}
And add this in the end of your script file
$file = fopen('run.txt', 'w+');
fwrite($file, ''); //will delete run word for the next try ;)
fclose('run.txt');
That will check if script already work by checking runt.txt contents
if run word exist in run.txt it will not run
Running a cron would definitively be a better solution. Idea to store url in a table is a good one.
To answer to the original question, you may run a ps auxwww command with exec (Check this page: How to get list of running php scripts using PHP exec()? ) and move your function in a separated php file.
exec("ps auxwww|grep myfunction.php|grep -v grep", $output);
Just add following on the top of your script.
<?php
// Ensures single instance of script run at a time.
$fileName = basename(__FILE__);
$output = shell_exec("ps -ef | grep -v grep | grep $fileName | wc -l");
//echo $output;
if ($output > 2)
{
echo "Already running - $fileName\n";
exit;
}
// Your php script code.
?>
Suppose there are two scripts Requester.php and Provider.php, and Requester requires processing from Provider and makes an http request to it (Provider.php?data="data"). In this situation, Provider quickly finds the answer, but to maintain the system must perform various updates throughout the database. Is there a way to immediately return the value to Requester, and then continue processing in Provider.
Psuedo Code
Provider.php
{
$answer = getAnswer($_GET['data']);
echo $answer;
//SIGNAL TO REQUESTER THAT WE ARE FINISHED
processDBUpdates();
return;
}
You can flush the output buffer with the flush() command.
Read the comments in the PHP manual for more info
I use this code for running a process in the background (works on Linux).
The process runs with its output redirected to a file.
That way, if I need to display status on the process, it's just a matter of writing a small amount of code to read and display the contents of the output file.
I like this approach because it means you can completely close the browser and easily come back later to check on the status.
You basically want to signal the end of 1 process (return to the original Requester.php) and spawn a new process (finish Provider.php). There is probably a more elegant way to pull this off, but I've managed this a couple different ways. All of them basically result in exec-ing a command in order to shell off the second process.
adding the following > /dev/null 2>&1 & to the end of your command will allow it to run in the background without inhibiting the actual execution of your current script
Something like the following may work for you:
exec("wget -O - \"$url\" > /dev/null 2>&1 &");
-- though you could do it as a command line PHP process as well.
You could also save the information that needs to be processed and handle the remaining processing on a cron job that re-creates the same sort of functionality without the need to exec.
I think you'll need on the provider to send the data (be sure to flush), and then on the Requester, use fopen/fread to read an expected amount of data, so you can drop the connection to the Provider and continue. If you don't specify an amount of data to expect, I would think the requester would sit there waiting for the Provider to close the connection, which probably doesn't happen until the end of it's run (ie. all the secondary work intensive tasks are complete). You'll need to try out a few POC's..
Good luck.
Split the Provider in two: ProviderCore and ProviderInterface. In ProviderInterface just do the "quick and easy" part, also save a flag in database that the recent request hasn't been processed yet. Run ProviderCore as a cron job that searches for that flag and completes processing. If there's nothing to do, ProviderCore will terminate and retry in (say) 2 minutes.
I'm going out on a limb here, but perhaps you should try cURL or use a socket to update the requester?
You could start another php process in Provider.php using pcntl_fork()
Provider.php
{
// Fork process
$pid = pcntl_fork();
// You are now running both a daemon process and the parent process
// through the rest of the code below
if ($pid > 0) {
// PARENT Process
$answer = getAnswer($_GET['data']);
echo $answer;
//SIGNAL TO REQUESTER THAT WE ARE FINISHED
return;
}
if ($pid == 0) {
// DAEMON Process
processDBUpdates();
return;
}
// If you get here the daemon process failed to start
handleDaemonErrorCondition();
return;
}