I'm copying a file from $source to $destination.
If I execute copy($source, $destination) from PowerShell, it works.
If I call this copy($source, $destination) from Apache, it complains copy(...): failed to open stream: Permission Denied.
I am able to open up explorer and copy and paste file manually. I am using PHP 7.1, Apache 2.4 on Windows Server 2012R2.
Why is this happening? Could someone provide an insight?
If run under Windows Apache already has all the permissions it needs, as it runs under the LocalSystem account, which has extensive read/write access to local paths. This is inherited by PHP and the scripts it runs.
If there is a problem then –
The additional file permissions that have been set up afterwards are at fault (check Windows Event viewer).
The configuration has been incorrectly edited, such as the: WP upload path settings, php.ini temp folder location + upload settings, etc.
The Apache Service ‘Log On’ account has been changed from “LocalSystem” to something else (check Service’s Properties).
Possibly PHP’s open_basedir setting has been enabled in VirtualHost or .htaccess and is restricting the paths PHP can access.
Or there are internal PHP errors (check the website’s HTTP and PHP error logs).
EDIT
Since it is sugggested i add this solution possibility if you are stuck at point 3:
Create a user with extensive file permissions and change Apaches service to run under that user. I strongly suggest not to use the system admin user (or any admin user) profile for this.
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).
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 am trying to setup a basic apache 2 webserver just for testing purposes. I have apache 2 installed on Ubuntu 11.10. I can access the root directory on the webserver just fine by going to "localhost" in my browser. This is all located in the default directory: /var/www. However, the problem starts whenever I try to access the subdirectories of my webserver. So, for example if I goto "localhost/phpproject/", which has an index.php file listed in it (and I did test to make sure PHP was working correctly), all it seems to want to do in my browser is attempt to download a file when I type in the address instead of actually displaying anything.
I even tried to give full permissions on the subdirectory to make sure it wasn't just a permissions-related problem. Any ideas?
First of all, you shouldn't be keeping your development files in /var/www folder. Configure your apache to keep your web files within your home directory. In doing so, you don't have to have sudo privilege to edit files in /var/www. If you want to follow my setup, create a directory called www in your home folder /home/yourname/www. Look at my config of /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/000-default
http://pastebin.com/3gcE59Lh
It works good for me.
If you change your config like this, make sure to restart apache [sudo service apache2 restart]
Make sure that you installed PHP correctly and registered PHP in your Apache configuration.
This is the key here, it looks like it's sending you the index.php file, test a PHP file in the main folder behind this sub-directory and see if it tries to download it.
File Could just be:
<?php
phpinfo();
See if putting that in index.php in the parent folder gives you a phpinfo page or tries to download index.php.
If it tries to download it it's just that PHP is not configured in apache to handle files that end in .php
To configure it, add the following lines to your httpd.conf file
LoadModule php4_module modules/libphp4.so
#
# Cause the PHP interpreter handle files with a .php extension.
#
<Files *.php>
SetOutputFilter PHP
SetInputFilter PHP
LimitRequestBody 9524288
</Files>
AddType application/x-httpd-php .php
Make sure that you installed PHP correctly and registered PHP in your apache configuration.
The manual should explain the required installation steps in detail.
in Ubuntu you should install the LAMP option using tasksel at the CL. That will give you Apache, MySQL and PHP all working together. It sounds like you may have installed them separatley and have not configured PHP correctly. mime types determine the servers handling of specific file types.
apesa#ubunt$ sudo tasksel
Follow the prompts
EDIT:
We used to make all the config changes in httpd.conf. If you used package manager, like you did then you will have a distributed configuration environment. You will need to go to etc/apache2/mods enabled and look in the php.conf file. There are directions inside. It sounds like you need to make sure the web server understands the directories and FS locations. Look at #Chrispy example. You won't be using the first line as the php module in your env are loaded via php.load and the config is done in php.conf. That AddType directive is important and tells the server to exec your file instead of serving it. have a look. BTW, the Apache Project supports one of the best listservers out there at URL:http://httpd.apache.org/userslist.html
I want to create a Chrome app, but I have the same problem as this guy. When I add the .php extension and I run the app, it downloads the file.Should I do something more? I have installed PHP (if that means to download and extract the file in the same folder with my app, I'd be wrong). I'm a beginner... :(
EDIT
Some of you told me to install Apache or IIS. I said earlier that I want to create a Chrome app.
Do I need to install Apache? Where would I run it (I don't have a local host, Chrome extensions and apps use the "chrome-extension://" prefix, which means it is hosted on the browser). What about more information (you've all been helpful by now)?
EDIT 2
It turns out that Google Chrome doesn't allow developers toto run PHP inside Chrome apps.
Thanks for your help!
This means the server is either missing the PHP plugin (either CGI or otherwise) or the the server doesn't recognize that it must pass a file with the extension in to PHP for pre-processing.
If you're on a host out of your control (e.g. using GoDaddy) then make sure they allow PHP (some of the free hosts won't have PHP as they deam it an unnecessary security risk). If it's your own server, make sure you installed PHP and it's enabled.
If it DOES has PHP installed, but you're not getting it to parse, you'll need to bind the .php extension to the PHP handler using either an .htaccess file or the config.
For apache, your http.conf needs the following (assuming you already have PHP plugin):
AddType application/x-httpd-php .php
Or for something more broad, place an .htaccess file with the above code in your hosted directory.
EDIT
You mentioned you installed PHP. I'm going to assume you're using Apache, as IIS now has a Web Extensions installer that would (typically) take care of the "hard part" for you. So, having said that, open your http.conf (Usually located in C:\Program Files\Apache Software Foundation\Apache2.2\conf\ [using 2.2 as a demo version]). Within that file, at the bottom, add the following [replacing files paths to those that correlate to your own install]:
LoadModule php5_module "C:/php/php5apache2_2.dll"
AddType application/x-httpd-php .php
PHPIniDir "C:/php"
A better reference can be found by googling "install PHP [version] on [webserver]". Here's just one of the results I was able to locate.
Do you have a server installed on your machine? PHP is a server-side script & unlike Javascript you cannot run it without a server.
PHP files are server side code only. So you need to install a local server like APACHE to get the PHP script to execute.
PHP must be run on a web server, not your desktop. Install PHP on your webserver, then open the PHP file from a web browser via: http://localhost/yourfile.php
You need an Apache server on your computer. download xampp: http://www.apachefriends.org/en/xampp.html and put your files in the htdocs folder.
EDIT:
This will explain how to install a PHP environment: http://www.tanguay.info/web2008/tutorial.php?idCode=phpDevelopmentQuick