Check Files In Directory Are Modified - php

Question

I need to deploy a PHP application written by CodeIgniter to client's web server (CentOS 5 or 6). As PHP is the scripting language, it does not need to compile to binary code for deployment. It has chances that client will modify the PHP program by themselves without a notice to me. If client has modified the program that made the application out of order, we need to take extra man power to find their modification and fix it.
So I would like to made something that can easy to let me know any files (php, css, html, etc.) of the application has been modification after my deployment. Is there any method suggested by anyone?
Thank you,

Answer 1

Use filemtime()
int filemtime ( string $filename )
This PHP function returns the time when the data blocks of a file were being written to, that is, the time when the content of the file was changed.
<?php
// outputs e.g. somefile.txt was last modified: December 12 2014 09:16:23.
$filename = 'somefile.txt';
if (file_exists($filename)) {
echo "$filename was last modified: " . date ("F d Y H:i:s.", filemtime($filename));
}
?>
To get the last modification time of a directory, you can use this:
<pre>
$getLastModDir = filemtime("/path/to/directory/.");
</pre>
Take note on the last dot which is needed to see the directory as a file and to actually get a last modification date of it.
This comes in handy when you want just one 'last updated' message on the frontpage of your website and still taking all files of your website into account.
To get the modification date of some remote file, you can use the fine function by notepad at codewalker dot com (with improvements by dma05 at web dot de and madsen at lillesvin dot net).
But you can achieve the same result more easily now with stream_get_meta_data (PHP>4.3.0).
However a problem may arise if some redirection occurs. In such a case, the server HTTP response contains no Last-Modified header, but there is a Location header indicating where to find the file. The function below takes care of any redirections, even multiple redirections, so that you reach the real file of which you want the last modification date.
<?php
// get remote file last modification date (returns unix timestamp)
function GetRemoteLastModified( $uri )
{
// default
$unixtime = 0;
$fp = fopen( $uri, "r" );
if( !$fp ) {return;}
$MetaData = stream_get_meta_data( $fp );
foreach( $MetaData['wrapper_data'] as $response )
{
// case: redirection
if( substr( strtolower($response), 0, 10 ) == 'location: ' )
{
$newUri = substr( $response, 10 );
fclose( $fp );
return GetRemoteLastModified( $newUri );
}
// case: last-modified
elseif( substr( strtolower($response), 0, 15 ) == 'last-modified: ' )
{
$unixtime = strtotime( substr($response, 15) );
break;
}
}
fclose( $fp );
return $unixtime;
}
?>