[RESOLVED] Calling php file on Linux startup

siege

I created a PHP script thats supposed to email me server info. I want this script to be called ONLY when the system is powered up, before a user logs in. I was told to edit:
/etc/rc.local
Inside of that file I have:

php /home/www/estart.php

exit 0

the script however, is not being called. I checked the mail (postfix) logs and nothing. Any suggestions?

HalfaBee

You probably need to specify the full path to php.

siege

I did the below but that made the machine not want to get to the login screen

php /home/www/estart.php/

exit 0

How else would I write the full path?

stolzyboy

Is that the full path to the script?

You can maybe also try using GET.

GET /home/www/estart.php

cahva

Full path to PHP binary. examle:

/usr/bin/php /home/www/estart.php
exit 0

You could do the script itself as script and run that directly.
So if the next one is estart.php

#!/usr/bin/php
<?php
...
?>

You would give it executable bit with "chmod u+x estart.php" and then you can run it by calling it directly:

/home/www/estart.php

siege

I tried these variations and got nothing. Maybe I did something wrong... but i can't find where
rc.local ver 1:

#!/usr/bin/php
<?php
$ip = $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'];
//$fullhost = gethostbyaddr($ip);
//$host = preg_replace("/^[^.]+./", "*.", $fullhost);

$charset = 'UTF-8';

// the email where it gets delivered to
$to = "me@myisp.com";

// the originator of the email
$senderMail = "me@myisp.com";
$senderName = "from me";
$senderSubject = "Home Server IP";
$senderBody = "http://$ip";

//Add header information
$headers = "From: $senderName <$senderMail>\n";
$headers .= "Reply-To: $senderName <$senderMail>\n";

// To send HTML mail, the Content-type header must be set
$headers .= "MIME-Version: 1.0\r\n";
$headers .= "Content-Type: text/plain; charset=$charset; format=flowed\r\n";
$headers .= "Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit\r\n";
$headers .= "X-Mailer: PHP\r\n";


if(@mail($to, $senderSubject, $senderBody, $headers)){
	echo "it worked";
		}
		else
		{
	echo "nope, it didn't work.";

}
?>
exit 0

rc.local ver 2:

GET /home/www/estart.php
exit 0

rc.local ver 3:

/usr/bin/php /home/www/estart.php
exit 0

I also had the file executable from the beginning. Here are the permissions as per terminal:

root@myserver:~# ls -l /home/www/
total 28
-rwxrwxr-x 1 usera  groupname 1201 2008-02-28 10:58 estart.php

cahva

Well.. Does it work when you run it directly from shell? Or is the problem only when you boot the server and it does not run that script at startup?

siege

cahva wrote:
Well.. Does it work when you run it directly from shell? Or is the problem only when you boot the server and it does not run that script at startup?

I'm not sure how to test it directly from shell. Is it a set of commands you can giv eme to test it?

Or is the problem only when you boot the server and it does not run that script at startup

I know by accessing the script publicly like so: http://myIPaddress/estart.php that the script works; it sends me an email. If I check the mail.log file I can see that the script never even attempts to execute at or rather send mail at startup.

cahva

If you gave it execute rights, you can start it as any other command or executable.

If the script is as in "rc.local ver 1" then you just type:
/home/www/estart.php

And see what happens.

If it doenst work, your PHP path maybe wrong. Type "whereis php" and you will get the correct path to php. Then modify the first line with the right path to php. exit 0 is not needed in the end btw.

siege

Heres what it reported back....

me@myserver:~$ /home/www/estart.php
/home/www/estart.php: line 1: syntax error near unexpected token `newline'
/home/www/estart.php: line 1: `<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">'
me@myserver:~$ whereis php
php:
me@myserver:~$

cahva

Now you have something seriously messed up. The script you gave doesnt contain any html tags so that error is "impossible". So I think estart.php script doesnt contain the script you gave before.

If "whereis php" doesnt give you anything, it isnt even installed or its with different name.

First find where the actual php binary is. It should be in /usr/bin/ or /usr/local/bin (varies from OS to OS).

I looked at your script and you cannot use $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'] if you execute the the script with cli version of PHP(simply, it doesnt exist). What do you really want to know about the server when it starts up? Server's IP? Why? 🙂

siege

cahva wrote:
Now you have something seriously messed up. The script you gave doesnt contain any html tags so that error is "impossible". So I think estart.php script doesnt contain the script you gave before.

It does.... I left the following out when I type it into the rc.local directly. I thought it wouldnt work rihgt with it in.

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
		<head>
		<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />
		<title>Send Mail</title>
		</head>
		<body>
				<?php
$ip = $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'];
//$fullhost = gethostbyaddr($ip);
//$host = preg_replace("/^[^.]+./", "*.", $fullhost);

$charset = 'UTF-8';

// the email where it gets delivered to
$to = "me@myisp.com";

// the originator of the email
$senderMail = "ime@myisp.com";
$senderName = "from me";
$senderSubject = "Home Server IP";
$senderBody = "http://$ip";

//Add header information
$headers = "From: $senderName <$senderMail>\n";
$headers .= "Reply-To: $senderName <$senderMail>\n";

// To send HTML mail, the Content-type header must be set
$headers .= "MIME-Version: 1.0\r\n";
$headers .= "Content-Type: text/plain; charset=$charset; format=flowed\r\n";
$headers .= "Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit\r\n";
$headers .= "X-Mailer: PHP\r\n";


if(@mail($to, $senderSubject, $senderBody, $headers)){
	echo "it worked";
		}
		else
		{
	echo "nope, it didn't work.";

}
?>
		</body>
</html>

/usr/bin/ or /usr/local/bin

I have ubuntu server 7.10 installed. I know i have php installed because I put it in and my other scripts also work. I cannot find the binary at one of those locations. I can find plenty of php5 files. As far as I know, there isn't a php binary.

My script emails me the current IP address of the server, since it doesnt have a static IP.

cahva

Ok.. Well you cannot do it like that. There is no good way to determine public IP with PHP. If you want to use PHP you could use something like:

estart.php

#!/usr/bin/php
<?php
$url = 'http://whatismyip.org';
$ip = exec('wget -qO - '.$url);

$email = 'me@myisp.com';

$to      = $email;
$subject = 'Home server IP';
$message = "Home server ip is:\n{$ip}";
$headers = "From: {$email}\r\n" .
    "Reply-To: {$email}\r\n" .
    'X-Mailer: PHP/' . phpversion();

mail($to, $subject, $message, $headers);

You have to have PHP cli and wget installed.

siege

OK. we are making some progress... turns out i had wget already installed but... i did not have php5-cli
Once i installed it I went back to the rc.local file and erased the entries from before. The I entered

php /home/www/estart.php/

exit 0

and I received an email when my machine booted up. great. unfortunately (like you mentioned) my email body said: http
and no IP address. Next I copy and pasted the code you gave me and put it into the rc.local ... but nothing happened. humm... So what I did was take that same code and adapt it into mt estart.php and it works but its spotty
sometimes the email does not get sent,but returns two emails (or however many emails it takes until it works again) next time when it works
is that my MTA causing trouble or is it having trouble accessing the URL?
.... THANK YOU for your patience and help

rshields

I tried to get my ip address a dozen different ways from within php (no shell_exec's) but couldn't make it happen, so I wrote something to do this for me. Trial and error told me which results to return. The linux case was tested on XUbuntu; I'm guessing it's going to be the same (substr($matches[11], 5)) on Ubuntu. When I need my remote ip in a cli application I use the following function:

function getServerAddress() { // returns active ip
	global $verbose;
	if ($verbose) print "checking for Operating System...\n";
	switch(PHP_OS) {
	case "Darwin":	if ($verbose) print "Mac OS X found\n";
					$ifconfig = shell_exec('ifconfig | grep netmask | grep broadcast');
					$matches = explode(" ", $ifconfig);
					//print_r($matches);
					return $matches[1];
					//break;
	case "Linux":	if ($verbose) print "Linux found\n";
					$ifconfig = shell_exec('ifconfig | grep Bcast');
					$matches = explode(" ", $ifconfig);
					//print_r($matches);
					return substr($matches[11],5);
					//break;
	default:		if ($verbose) die("Could not determine Operating System!");
	}
}

Call it with something like this:
$myIP = getServerAddress();

This function is really useful when developing on a laptop, usually connected to a lan with a dhcp-assigned address.

When I feel the urge to add windows support it will go in as another case, but I really haven't used windows much in the past year.