PHP + PhantomJS Rasterize - php

I'm using PhantomJS 64 bit in my PHP application to dynamically capture an HTML page to be emailed to the user.
phantomjs rasterize.js "http://..." /path_to_images/image.png
This method works fine when I run the above on the command line but when the PHP script runs the command using exec it fails with no output and returns exit code 11.
If I switch it to use the 32 bit phantomJS binary, the command succeeds but fails to load the google JSAPI on the page since with error Reference Error: can't find variable google. This is a problem because not all of the page content is loaded and captured as an image. The JSAPI is included using HTTPS. If I switch to HTTP, the reference error is gone but the rendered image comes out all black.
I tested the command as the same user that php is running as.
To sum it up:
command> phantomjs_64 rasterize.js "http://..." /path_to_images/image.png
OK
exec('phantomjs_64 rasterize.js "http://..." /path_to_images/image.png');
No Output, Exit Code 11
command> phantomjs rasterize.js "http://..." /path_to_images/image.png
exec('phantomjs rasterize.js "http://..." /path_to_images/image.png');
Incomplete Output
Does anyone know why the default phantomJS rasterize.js script would fail when running on PHP or have a workaround for this?

UPDATE: This great article by Arlo Carreon points out how to make this work on HostGator shared hosting (this was my problem). Simply add 2>&1 at the end of the command to redirect the output. The 64 bit version still does not work but this fixes the 32 bit version.
It turns out that this only happens when the PHP script is requested through the Apache web server. The workaround is to create a database entry for users that need to receive the email and setup a cron to execute the PHP script that calls PhantomJS for each user entry in the DB. When the cron is set to run at the smallest interval the user perceives that the email was generated and sent immediately.

Related

How to use PHP to execute AutoHotKey script on Windows Server 2016?

I have a Windows Server 2016 VPS with Plesk and PHP 7.1x.
I am trying to execute a simple AutoHotKey script from PHP using the following command:
<?php shell_exec('start /B "C:\Program Files\AutoHotkey\AutoHotkey.exe" C:\inetpub\vhosts\mydomain.com\App_Data\myahkscript.ahk'); ?>
This is the only line on the page. I have tried different ahk scripts, the current one simply creates a MsgBox.
When I execute my php page, on VPS Task Manager I see three processes created with the expected USR: cmd.exe, conhost.exe and php-cgi.exe. However, my PHP page just sits waiting on the server and nothing actually happens on the server.
I have also tried the same line except replacing shell_exec with exec. This seems to make no difference. I have tried without start /b with both commands. In that case the PHP page completes but no new processes are started.
I cannot find any errors in any logs: Mod_Security, Plesk Firewall, IIS.
Any ideas?
EDIT:
I tried my command from the VPS command prompt and immediately slapped in the face with the obvious issue of the space in 'Program Files'. I quoted the string as shown above and the command works. This eliminated the hang when running from PHP. However, the command still does nothing when executed from the web page.
EDIT:
Based on suggestions from the referenced post 'debugging exec()':
var_dump: string(0)""
$output: Array()
$return_val: 1
One point was that I would probably not be able to invoke GUI applications. That puts a damper on the idea.

php exec() run Rscript successfully by cmd line but not working by browser

I am trying to write a web app to run my R script.
I plan to use php shell_exec() to make this happen.
I wrote a test script like this
<?php echo shell_exec("Rscript /var/www/html/demo/MyRScript.R"); ?>
I run it through command line.
php test.php, it gives right output, I also observe through htop and found the process was using 100% cpu for couple of minutes.
However, when I tried to run it through visiting it through browser, through the address http://myURL/demo/test.php. It didn't run properly, it only gives first few line of my R script onbrief Off On FALSE 405 0 TRUE 0 405 petitioner P R FALSE 0 396 TRUE 414 0and stopped immediately. I cannot find that process through htop either.
I have tried other simple command line like ls, rm, they all work properly both on cmd line and through web app.
I have no idea what is wrong. Can it because the process takes too much CPU, so some mechanism will terminate it if it is call by web?
Or if there is any debug tool or method I can use to help me find the problem.
This is my first question on Stack overflow, I don't know if my information is enough. please tell me if there is other more information needed to tackle the problem.
Thank you so much.
It turn out to be the file permission problem.
In my R script, there is a line trying to access a file, while the web server user www-data do not have permission to read. After grant the permission to it, everything goes fine.
Adding 2>$1 at the end of my command is very useful, I am able to get the error message in my browser.

Running console program in PHP

I wrote a simple PHP code to execute a console program:
<?php
$cmd = escapeshellcmd('progName.exe arg1 arg2 arg3');
exec($cmd);
?>
If I run the command on the console directly on the server, it works. However, when I run the PHP on the browser, it doesn't work. The process progName.exe is running (checked using Task Manager on the server), but it never finishes. This program is supposed to compute some parameters from the arguments and write the result to a binary file, and also produce a .WAV file. Here is the error message I get on the browser:
Error Summary
HTTP Error 500.0 - Internal Server Error
C:\php\php-cgi.exe - The FastCGI process exceeded configured activity timeout
Detailed Error Information
Module FastCgiModule
Notification ExecuteRequestHandler
Handler PHP
Error Code 0x80070102
Then I wrote a simple console program that write a sentence to a text file (writeTxt.exe hello.txt). Using the same PHP script, I ran it on the browser and it works.
I already tried to increase the timeout on the server, but still have the same error.
What could cause this problem?
When you execute a program in PHP using the exec function (e.g. exec('dir')), PHP waits until it is ended or you sent it to the background and PHP comes back directly (see documentation, especially the comments).
According to your posted PHP sources ($cmd = escapeshellcmd('progName.exe arg1 arg2 arg3');) the program is not sent to background by PHP - so what stays is that progName.exe...
...sends itself or a fork to the background (unlikely, but look into the sources of progName.exe)
...is waiting for input (<-- this is my favorite)
I missed something ;-)
As I said I bet it is the second option. Hope that helped a bit.

PHP's shell_exec won't allow "Watir::Browser.new :firefox" to execute

I'm brand new to ruby and Watir, here's my issue...
I have a MySQL DB with test data that I need. I've done a lot in the past with this data and so I have a whole library of PHP tools for accessing this data, marking data as in use/used/bad/etc, and in general I have a lot of time invested in the PHP framework. So I'd really like to use the PHP framework as a wrapper around the Watir script - for example, use PHP to grab test user login data from the DB and pass it to the ruby script for processing.
I now have sites with javascript that need work/testing and PHP & cURL can't deal with this. So I'm working with Watir-WebDriver on Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick, Desktop not Server) for these sites. The problem I'm having is with the use of PHP's shell_exec of the ruby script with all the Watir code.
The PHP shell_exec is executing the file - I can see it because I have some puts lines in the file which are being displayed. However, the code appears to be failing on the line
ff = Watir::Browser.new :firefox
I'm not getting an error from PHP.
The PHP line is:
echo shell_exec('ruby /var/www/watir_test.rb');
The ruby script works fine when I call it from a terminal window with the line:
ruby /var/www/watir_test.rb
I originally expected this was a permissions issue since it worked from the command line but not from a browser. However, since it can call the file well enough to return the hardcoded data I've provided for the test then ruby file permissions don't seem to be the issue. Could there be a permissions issue with opening a Firefox window from the www-data user?
When I run
ruby -d -v /var/www/watir_test.rb
I get:
{:extension=>:webdriver} {"app.update.enabled"=>"false"} {"browser.link.open_newwindow"=>"2"} {"browser.shell.checkDefaultBrowser"=>"false"} {"extensions.update.enabled"=>"false"} {"security.warn_entering_secure.show_once"=>"false"} {"webdriver_assume_untrusted_issuer"=>true} {"startup.homepage_welcome_url"=>"\"about:blank\""} {"browser.tabs.warnOnClose"=>"false"} {"extensions.update.notifyUser"=>"false"} {"toolkit.networkmanager.disable"=>"true"} {"security.warn_entering_weak.show_once"=>"false"} {"webdriver_firefox_port"=>"7055"} {"browser.download.manager.showWhenStarting"=>"false"} {"extensions.logging.enabled"=>"true"} {"network.manage-offline-status"=>"false"} {"network.http.max-connections-per-server"=>"10"} {"security.warn_submit_insecure"=>"false"} {"security.warn_entering_weak"=>"false"} {"security.warn_leaving_secure"=>"false"} {"prompts.tab_modal.enabled"=>"false"} {"security.warn_viewing_mixed.show_once"=>"false"} {"dom.max_script_run_time"=>"30"} {"webdriver_accept_untrusted_certs"=>true} {"browser.safebrowsing.enabled"=>"false"} {"security.warn_leaving_secure.show_once"=>"false"} {"signon.rememberSignons"=>"false"} {"javascript.options.showInConsole"=>"true"} {"app.update.auto"=>"false"} {"browser.EULA.3.accepted"=>"true"} {"browser.tabs.warnOnOpen"=>"false"} {"dom.disable_open_during_load"=>"false"} {"network.http.phishy-userpass-length"=>"255"} {"security.warn_entering_secure"=>"false"} {"browser.startup.homepage"=>"\"about:blank\""} {"browser.EULA.override"=>"true"} {"browser.dom.window.dump.enabled"=>"true"} {"browser.startup.page"=>"0"} {"browser.link.open_external"=>"2"} {"browser.search.update"=>"false"} {"browser.sessionstore.resume_from_crash"=>"false"} {"security.warn_viewing_mixed"=>"false"} {"dom.report_all_js_exceptions"=>"true"} {"webdriver_enable_native_events"=>false} {"devtools.errorconsole.enabled"=>"true"}
How do I get PHP to execute the shell_exec properly? The script works and my initial tests were run using firewatir (which shell_exec ran fine) but I am really wanting to use Watir-WebDriver instead of FireWatir - WatirWebDriver should be capable of running a Chrome browser (and IE on a Windows machine) while FireWatir can only run Firefox.
Thanks
Gabe
Here's my "Create Browser" code:
# Include the RubyGems file
require 'rubygems'
# Include the Watir-WebDriver file.
require 'watir-webdriver'
# Create the necessary objects
def create_browser(proxy)
# Setup the proper Firefox Profile
profile = Selenium::WebDriver::Firefox::Profile.new
profile.proxy = Selenium::WebDriver::Proxy.new :http => proxy
puts "<br>Using proxy " + proxy + "..."
#ff=FireWatir::Firefox.new :profile => profile
ff = Watir::Browser.new :firefox #, :profile => profile
puts "<br>Firefox ready..."
return ff
end
If the server is headless, you should install the headless gem so that Firefox can work.
require 'watir-webdriver'
require 'headless'
headless = Headless.new
headless.start
b = Watir::Browser.start 'www.google.com'
puts b.title
b.close
headless.destroy
See: http://watirwebdriver.com/headless/
It't a permission problem, the PHP script runs with the permissions of the server, normally apache.
You can do a sudo www and try to run the script then with rb to see if there is a problem when running ruby with the server user.
Put the two lines of code that is below at the very top of your PHP script. The result of this is that when you browse to your PHP page with your browser it will display exactly what the errors are, including any permission errors.
ini_set("display_errors",1);
error_reporting(E_ALL);
So a recent update to Firefox killed it's support for Watir (no JSSH update if I remember). As a result I rewrote what little code I had for Selenium::WebDriver. But I'm thinking that isn't particularly relevant (its included in case it is relevant I don't know it).
My ultimate solution was to use phpseclib. This allows me to SSH into the machine via their SSH2 PHP class. Once logged in as my typical username (with typical password) I was able to fire off a headless version of my script no problem. The only real issues this creates is that I now have to view everything that's going on through log files and screenshots but that was likely to be true no matter what solution I came up with.
phpseclib needs your username and password for the server (at least until you set some form of public private key pair). So I wouldn't want to do this on a publicly available machine without a couple of layers of security - like setting .htaccess to deny read access to the file with the login data, encrypting the password stored in the file, etc. However, for my purposes I'm logging into one machine on my LAN from another machine on my LAN. The password is only good on my LAN (not my web servers) and while my LAN can see out it should not be (easily) available to the rest of the world (to the best of my knowledge). So the security concerns are minimal.
I never did figure this out. Headless isn't the answer to getting PHP to exec the script. I'm pretty sure it is a permissions issue with Firefox's executable but I can't be positive until I find an actual fix.
Ultimately I've had to break up the tool where PHP manages the DB and task scheduling. Then PHP creates text files with all the data necessary for ruby to run the browser to right site, login, etc, etc... Then ruby moves the data file to one of a few different folders (success, failure, bad login, etc) and adds some text to the data file. Finally PHP parses all this info in the moved text files and updates the DB with that info.
It's less than ideal but it is getting the job done. Now I just need to figure out how to run all of this with mutliple threads...
Thanks for the help

Why has my PHP system() command stopped returning output to my scripts ... i used to work!

I have a PHP script that calls a .bat file using system(). The output is written to the screen and I derive some values from parsing this output. This is running on windows 2003 IIS server. PHP v5.2.0
Specifically I am using this script to launch an Amazon EC2 instance and assign an IP address to it. It has worked great for me so far but recently the problem started.
Here is the code
$resultBatTemp = system("cmd /C C:\Inetpub\ec2\my_batch_file_to_launch_instance.bat");
$resultBat = (string)$resultBatTemp;
$instanceId = substr($resultBat, 9, 10);
...
Once I have this instace Id I can run another batch file that calls associates an ip address with this instance. It would appear that the instance does get launched but I never get the output on the screen.
For some reason this has all stopped working, the page freezes and never refreshes. I also need to completely exit safari or mozilla otherwise all pages from the website fail to load. Only when I relaunch the browser can i view the website again. I've connected to the webserver that hosts these scripts and checked PHP error log but nothing shows there. I've opened a DOS prompt and entered the code from the bat file that way and it connects to amazon and launches the instance fine. Ive isolated this bit of code and removed the system command and the rest of the script runs fine, so it appears that the hold up is with outputting the results of the bat file.
Recently I have purchased a new domain name for the site so this script is running from this domain. Might this cause the problem?
thanks
------------------------------------------------UPDATE-----------------------------------------------
Well hope this helps someone, I didnt find out what was wrong but created a new PHP file with a simple system command that called a .bat file, and a non-existent .bat file expecting to get an error back but nothing - just the usual hang for ages. So I restarted IIS and this fixed the problem. Dont know what was wrong but that did the trick.
Maybe first check what the system() call returns. According to documentation it will return FALSE in case of failure. Also, including your my_batch_file_to_launch_instance.bat in the question might help in solving it.
Try using the passthru function
Also make sure that all your commands are safe use escapeshellarg() or escapeshellcmd() to ensure that users cannot trick the system into executing arbitrary commands.

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