I'm beginner in Symfony, I wanna know if there is any way to control the process of my functions ( I mean to stop it or to run it.. at any time I want)
I found this case using the Symfony process library :
use Symfony\Component\Process\Process;
$process = new Process('#command');
$process->start();
// ... do other things
$process->stop(3, SIGINT);
But, is it necessary to use the process as a command?
Is it similar to pcntl_fork?
if you use Process component from Symfony it will launch processess as commands, there are no other options right now. However you can still use pcntl PHP functions if you are sure there is no chance with Process class.
Take a look to Process class and you will realize that internally it is using pcntl constants as POSIX signals and so on.
https://github.com/symfony/process/blob/master/Process.php
Related
My question is quite simple. I'm coming from Python world, where it's very simple to execute Selenium testing code within a program, just writing something like:
from selenium import webdriver
driver = webdriver.Firefox()
driver.get("http://www.python.org")
driver.close()
When using PHP, things are getting harder: I wrote something like that
require 'vendor/autoload.php';
class MyTest extends PHPUnit_Extensions_Selenium2TestCase {
public function setUp() {
$this->setBrowser('Firefox');
$this->setBrowserUrl('http://www.python.org');
}
public function testToto() {
$this->url('/');
}
}
...which kinda works when I execute phpunit MyTest.php.
But what I would like to do is to instanciate my test class in PHP code, and execute my Selenium commands "programmatically", like:
$myTest = new MyTest();
$myTest->testToto();
And here it sucks :(
PHP Fatal error: Uncaught exception 'PHPUnit_Extensions_Selenium2TestCase_Exception' with message 'There is currently no active session to execute the 'url' command.
So is there a way to execute Selenium code directly from PHP script without executing command line things with phpunit?
Edit: What am I trying to achieve? My project is to build a testing application which must be able to launch tests within a UI built by a end user thanks to a user friendly drag and drop builder (the user chooses which test he wants to execute first, then another, and so on). So I would like to avid ececuting phpunit commands with a ugly PHP exec: to me, the best option is to launch test case methods programmatically!
I think the pain comes from trying to use the PHPUnit Webdriver integration, without really using PHPUnit.
You can write code like your Python example by using a standalone Webdriver implementation (that does not need PHPUnit). I recommend the one written by Facebook:
https://github.com/facebook/php-webdriver
but there are some more:
http://docs.seleniumhq.org/docs/03_webdriver.jsp#php
You can also use these implementations inside PHPUnit tests. I do that as I don't like the PHPUnit Webdriver implementation.
With these it's trivial to write your example in PHP.
Well, a very nice question first of all. The short answer is yes you can, but it's too much pain. PHPUnit is just a modestly complicated, huge, scary and amazing library with a gadzillion of extensions. In the nutshell it reads the configuration, finds the tests, and runs them.
You can put a break point inside your test and trace to the top what it does, what parameters it accepts and literally simulate the whole thing. That would be the "proper" and crazy way, and the most complex too.
The simpler way would be by finding out what the test case class needs in order to run (break point & trace are always your best friends), in this particular case it turned out to be just this:
$myTest = new MyTest();
$myTest->setUp(); // Your setup will always be called prior the test.
$myTest->prepareSession(); // Specific to Selenium test case, called from `runTest` method.
$myTest->testToto();
But, even in PHPUnit_Extensions_Selenium2TestCase there is a lot of stuff that are not publicly accessible and it feels just a strike of luck. But you get the idea. Besides, simply calling a method of a test case class will result in two things: nothing happens, or you get an exception. All the fancy result tracing happens higher in the hierarchy.
I can only guess what you are trying to achieve, but probably if you ask the question about the actual problem we'd be able to help more.
Edit
exec might seem ugly indeed, but it's there for a very good reason: process isolation. There are situations when one piece of the code that is being tested changes the environment and it becomes conflicting with another piece of code, e.g., session-related, sent headers, etc. When you come across one of them, you will be praying on exec.
In your case, the easiest would be to launch the PHPUnit from the command line, but you might need to write a custom formatter to get the data in the necessary format out of it, unless you are happy with the existing ones.
Another option would be to use the the existing client for the WebDriver / Selenium and simply send commands directly to the Selenium server, I assume that's what you really need? You can find out the piece of code responsible for that in the PHPUnit extension or there's another cool project called Behat (and Mink). I believe their client is in the Behat/MinkSelenium2Driver repository. And if you don't like those, I'm sure there are other php wrappers you can find on the github, or can create your own using the existing ones as an example.
PS: Share a link to the project when it's up and running if its public.
I want to run some functions parallel in the background.
Is there a nice way to do this in Symfony2 or even with php?
Or is there only the Symfony\Component\Process\Process?
Can I use this Process with a function? I need the actual Context (logged in user and some session data), so it is not possible to source the function out to an external php-file...
Symfony2 Process component allows you to run some shell command or execute php-script in a different process.
To run exact function in a thread try look at PHP Thread class
Is there a way to kill a Windows process, say calc.exe, with PHP without using exec?
exec calls an external program, I try to avoid using that command unless necessary.
There is.
Use the W32api PHP extension, which provides access to the Win32 API - then use the TerminateProcess() API after aquiring a handle to the process.
define new function in PHP sources ( pure C )
compile you new PHP version with the defined function
call the new function, which was defined in PHP sources by you
PS
On this way you are able to make PHP able work with __asm { } insertions/add some kernel code , if you want it...
No, there isn't. PHP has little access to the system except through exec.
I am working on a ZF application that needs to run a command line script and then parse the results into something meaningful and return to the user.
I know there are various PHP functions, like exec and system, but I was wondering if there is anything built into Zend Framework that does command line scripting easily.
Even if there isn't a ZF specific function, what is the best function/method to use for running a command line script and then retrieving the results in PHP upon completion of the script.
I would write a Service which uses exec to get what you need. You can add some basic error handling there.
You can start an process under linux with this:
ZendX_Console_Process_Unix
But never tryed it..
We recently needed to do this (we use ZF too), hope this helps: http://www.kintek.com.au/web-design-blog/how-to-run-a-php-script-from-command-line/
I have a PHP script that is called from a cron job every minute. This script takes some info from the database and then calls another PHP script using the System function (passing it some parameters).
That means that I can start up to 10 scripts from this "main" one. And what I would like to do is that I would call the script and continue the execution of the main script, that is, not wait for the System call to complete and then call the next one.
How can this be done?
You may be able to use proc_open(), stream_select() and stream_set_blocking() in concert to achieve this kind of thing.
If that sounds vague, I was going to paste a big chunk of code in here that I used in a recent project that did something similar, but then felt it may hinder rather than help! In summary though, the code worked like this:
cronjob calls cronjob_wrapper.php
cronjob_wrapper.php creates a new Manager class and then calls start on it.
Manager class start method check to see how many instances are running (looking for pid files in a particular location). If it's less than a given max number of instances it writes out it's own process id to a pid file and then carries on
Manage class creates an instance of an appropriate Encoder class and calls exec on it.
The exec method uses proc_open, stream_select and stream_set_blocking to run a system command in a non-blocking fashion (running ffmpeg in this case - and could take quite a while!)
When it has finally run it cleans up its PID file and bails out.
Now the reason I'm being vague and handwavy is that our multiple instances here are being handled by the cronjob not by PHP. I was trying to do very much the kind of thing you are talking about, and got something working pretty well with pcntl_fork() and friends, but in the end I encountered a couple of problems (if I recall at least one was a bug in PHP) and decided that this approach was a much more rock-solid way to achieve the same thing. YMMV.
Well worth a look at those functions though, you can achieve a lot with them. Though somehow I don't think PHP will ever become the sockets programming language of choice... :)
If your OS supports it, you can use the pcntl_fork() function to spin off child processes that the parent doesn't wait for. Be careful though, it is easy to accidentally create too many child processes, especially if they take longer than expected to run!
I think the answer would be very similar to those already provided for Asynchronous PHP calls.
http://php.net/pcntl_fork
It's *NIX only but you can fork your script using the PCNTL extension.
I'm not sure that PHP supports threading. Check here.
You could run them in the background:
system('php yourscript.php &');
You just have to make sure that you check on the total number of processes running. All in all, not a super elegant solution. Instead cron you could let one script run for forever, I am thinking something like this:
<?php
while(true) {
// do whatever needs to be done.
}
?>
Careful though. PHP is not exactly known to be used as a daemon.
use php's version of fork or threads.