Communicating with WHM to create accounts

benbox

Hi people !

I'm wondering if any of you php coders have had any experience with coding a script that would communicate with WHM, which would create an account in a signup process.

It would literally be a command which would create an account from certain variables inputted (e.g. account name, domain name, password, package etc), this is all I really want.

I've seen the remote access key setup in WHM itself, so I assume it can be done - but how hard/easy is it to do?

Have you got any links to a site with a guide on how to set up such as script by any chance, or could you maybe post some sample code.

As you may have guessed I'm kinda new to WHM so I'm not sure sure how the account setup proecess works, so any guidance would be great.

Many thanks,
Ben

examancer

What is WHM?

I have had some experience with creating robot scripts that fill out forms and can easily be put into a function that can be passed simple variables. Theoretically, what ever you are trying to do should not be too difficult.. but then again, I have no idea what WHM is....

benbox

WHM (Web Host Manager) is a piece of software that you get with a reseller account for web hosting (well I suppose if you have a dedicated server you could use it as well..)... but it allows you to create and manage web hosting accounts, rather than just having one account you can have many for different users

examancer

OK... after a google search I take it you're talking about Web Host Manager...

Again, theoretically this shouldn't be too hard. I can post some HTTP_POST function you can use to fill out the form automatically. The only really challenges beyond that is if the form is behind a SSL connection, which I have never attempted, but I don't think would be too much of an obstacle.

Kudose

Can I just use cURL to post the data called by crontab via root?

examancer

Yes, cURL would work just great for this.

MarkR

This is an incredibly dodgy idea. If you were to attempt it, you would have to set up ALL the software correctly exactly as the ISP did, but on your dev server.

Needless to say, because this "WHM" is a piece of a software maintained and managed by someone else, without a documented machine-usable interface, any screen-scraping form-autofilling implementation you did, would be vulnerable to the slightest change in their software.

SO you COULD do it but:

It would be complicated and messy
The development environment would be a nightmare to set up
It could break at any time for reasons entirely outside your control.

If you have a genuine need to do this sort of thing, consider an alternative implementation (e.g. get a dedicated server and write scripts to generate accounts yourself).

Mark