50 Extremely Useful PHP Tools is just that: An awesome list of stuff that makes PHP development so much easier. A list like this would have saved so much time when I started learning PHP, but most of the stuff on that list didn’t even exist.
Posts Tagged: PHP
NetBeans for PHP
Sun Microsystems has added PHP support to their open-source Netbeans development IDE. I just tried the latest version (6.5) and I’m not impressed at all, at least with their OS X version: It’s slow and the Open File dialog takes a good 45 seconds (!) to load.
Switching to suPHP; What a Mess!
When one of my users reported problems deleting files he had uploaded using a PHP script, I quickly discovered all the files being uploaded were owned by the user running the web server: nobody. This meant only the root user could delete those files.
Apache suEXEC is commonly used to resolve this problem. It allows Apache to run as the user who owns the domain being accessed. This way, files created by PHP would be owned by the user owning the site instead of the default nobody user.
However, Apache suEXEC only works if you’re using CGI as the PHP handler. The PHP5 handler on my server was set to use CGI, but I have PHP4 configured as the default PHP version and it was configured to use DSO. When I tried changing PHP4 to use CGI as the handler, most of the domains on my server displayed this:
Warning: Unexpected character in input: ‘’ (ASCII=15) state=1 in /usr/local/cpanel/cgi-sys/php4 on line 772
Warning: Unexpected character in input: ‘ in /usr/local/cpanel/cgi-sys/php4 on line 772
Warning: Unexpected character in input: ‘ in /usr/local/cpanel/cgi-sys/php4 on line 772
Warning: Unexpected character in input: ‘ in /usr/local/cpanel/cgi-sys/php4 on line 772
Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_STRING in /usr/local/cpanel/cgi-sys/php4 on line 772
OK, that looks like a problem with cPanel. I don’t have time to debug cPanel’s problems.
suPHP, like suEXEC, is used to run Apache as the user who owns the domain. I decided to try recompiling Apache and PHP with suPHP enabled to see if that would fix the problem.
File Ownership Hell
suPHP worked, except now the sites using PHP sessions were trying to access stored session data in /tmp/ that was owned by the user nobody! So I deleted all the session data and that allowed the PHP sites to create new session data with file ownership of the user owning the domain.
But then I tried accessing my WordPress admin page and started getting permission denied errors in /wp-content/cache/. Same problem: the cache files that had been created before I enabled suPHP were owned by the user nobody and now the user who owns my domain couldn’t access them. A quick chown -R raamdev:raamdev /wp-content/cache/ fixed that problem.
Yeah, I could simply chown -R [user]:[user] /home/[user] for each of the users on the server, but there’s something about running a recursive command on files I’ve never seen, and know nothing about, that makes me uncomfortable.
More suPHP Limitations
I was beginning to worry that this was going to be more difficult than simply enabling suPHP and I wondered how many other sites I’m hosting could have similar problems. I tried accessing one of the high priority sites I’m hosting and discovered it was broken and displaying an “Internal Server Error”.
After a little research, I discovered that you cannot use php_value directives in .htaccess files with suPHP. The .htaccess file included with (created by?) Joomla! contained this at the bottom:
#Fix Register Globals
php_flag register_globals off
I already knew register_globals was turned off in the global PHP configuration, so I simply commented out that line and the site started working again.
Conclusion
It was at this point that I concluded it was too risky to just blindly enable suPHP while hosting over 50 domains, many of which I am not at all familiar with what’s being used or hosted. I will need to take the time to carefully crawl through all the sites making sure their .htaccess files don’t contain anything that might disrupt suPHP and then confirm all the sites are still working properly.
Lesson learned: Setup suPHP before you’re hosting 50+ domains.
Multiple Query Problems with mysql_query()
I was writing some code earlier today that involved writing data to two separate MySQL tables. The second INSERT statement needed to contain the automatically generated ID (auto_increment) of the first INSERT statement, so I wanted all the queries to run one after another.
Thinking it made the most sense to just build one long query and execute it all at once, I wrote code similar to the following:
// Build a query with multiple INSERT statements $q = "INSERT INTO sessions VALUES(NULL, '$name', '$desc', '$stime');"; $q .= "INSERT INTO events VALUES(LAST_INSERT_ID(), '$event', '$e_desc');"; // Execute query mysql_query($q, $conn) or die(mysql_error());
Upon running the code I received this error:
You have an error in your SQL syntax; check the manual that corresponds to your MySQL server version for the right syntax to use near '; INSERT INTO events VALUES(LAST_INSERT_ID(), '24', 'my event1', 'button')' at line 1
So, as I normally do when this kind of problem arises, I echoed the query that was being executed and, hoping to get more information on the error, I ran it directly from phpMyAdmin. Here is the SQL I ran:
INSERT INTO sessions VALUES(NULL, 'Raam', 'example', '2008-04-24 21:59:08'); INSERT INTO events VALUES(LAST_INSERT_ID(), '24', 'my event1', 'button');
phpMyAdmin says:
Your SQL query has been executed successfully
OK, so my SQL is fine.
I then looked up the mysql_query() function on php.net and found this little tidbit of info:
mysql_query() sends an unique query (multiple queries are not supported) to the currently active database on the server that’s associated with the specified link_identifier .
Ah, so multiple queries are not supported with the mysql_query() function. That’s most likely a security feature, but quite annoying none the less. The bottom line is, you cannot run multiple queries with mysql_query().
PHP5 has the mysqli_multi_query() function, which does allow you to run multiple queries (I know, I know, I should be coding for PHP5 by now).
Adding CC Recipients With PEAR Mail
I use the PEAR Mail package quite often in projects that require sending email — either user-generated or system-level notification emails. I recently wrote something at work that required CCing the user a copy of the email. My first thought was that simply adding CC headers with the users’ email address would suffice, but that just isn’t the case.
Since mail headers can be modified to state anything you want, PEAR Mail doesn’t actually use them to to figure out where to send the email (adding the CC header works fine and the users’ email address even shows up in the CC field, but they never receive the email).
A comment by Armin Frey that I found on the PEAR bug page for this problem explains what’s going on and offers a solution:
[2007-07-06 15:22 UTC] arminf (Armin Frey)
It seems that the Recipients decides where to send the e-mail and the
headers decide how to display it.The simple solution is that you add all the addresses to $recipients.
Here is the code I used:
$to = 'to@example.com'; $cc = 'cc@example.com'; $recipients = $to.", ".$cc; $headers['From'] = 'from@example.com'; $headers['To'] = $to; $headers['Subject'] = 'Test message'; $headers['Cc'] = 'cc@example.com'; $headers['Reply-To'] = 'from@example.com'; $send = $mail->send($recipients, $headers, $body);
The solution works perfectly. Now the email addresses show up in the correct fields and all the recipients receive the email. Unfortunately, this method does not work for BCCing users. I wonder if BCCing is even possible with PEAR Mail or if I’ll need to find something else. To Blind CC (aka, BCC) an address, simply add the address to the $recipients, but not to any of the $headers (thanks Jason!).
