Asynchronous Processing With PHP
Several weeks ago I was looking on line for a way to have PHP execute a background process, so that the page didn’t hang while some functionality happened. One way to do that is to use fsockopen() to open a URL to exec what you want. But I wanted to see if there was another way. This is what I came up with.
I should note that this isn’t that well tested. I ran it on a Windows and Linux system without incident to test it, but I haven’t given it a very thorough exam. Also note $call is completely unsanitized. If you’re using this and accepting anything from the web, you need to make really sure that $call is completely sane and free of evil.
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< ?php
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/* Note that the call itself isn’t sanitized in any way, so it’s
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important to make sure that this can’t be exploited, see
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docs for escapeshellcmd() for details
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*/
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// Demonstration
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if(launchBackgroundProcess(‘touch testfile.txt’)){
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print ‘Successfully launched background process’;
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}
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/**
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* Launch Background Process
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*
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* Launches a background process (note, provides no security itself, $call must be sanitized prior to use)
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* @param string $call the system call to make
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* @author raccettura
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*/
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function launchBackgroundProcess($call) {
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// Windows
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if(is_windows()){
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pclose(popen(’start /b ‘.$call.”, ‘r’));
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}
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// Some sort of UNIX
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else {
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pclose(popen($call.‘ /dev/null &’, ‘r’));
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}
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return true;
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}
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/**
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* Is Windows
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*
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* Tells if we are running on Windows Platform
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* @author raccettura
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*/
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function is_windows(){
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if(PHP_OS == ‘WINNT’ || PHP_OS == ‘WIN32′){
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return true;
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}
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return false;
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}
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?>
To run a PHP process you can obviously use launchBackgroundProcess('PHP /path/to/script.php');.
Now say we wanted to load a page while retrieving data from a process to display inline. We don’t want to wait for the entire command to finish, since that could take a while, and the user may believe something is wrong and reload (slowing down the system even more). A good example of this is an online traceroute utility. Here’s a quick example of that:
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< ?php
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/****
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* Again notice this is unsanitized since we trust ourselves. Coming from the web
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* it would need to be sanitized to ensure it’s safe to use. see escapeshellarg()
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****/
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$hostname = ‘accettura.com’;
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?>
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< !DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.1//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml11/DTD/xhtml11.dtd">
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<HTML xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
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<head>
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<title>Traceroute to $hostname</title>
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</head>
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<body>
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< ?php
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if(is_windows()){
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$cmd = ‘tracert -w 10′;
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} else {
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$cmd = ‘traceroute -w 10′;
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}
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$handle = popen("$cmd $hostname 2>&1", ‘r’);
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while(!feof($handle)) {
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$buffer = fgets($handle);
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$buffer = ‘<p>’.trim(htmlspecialchars($buffer)).‘</p>’;
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echo $buffer;
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ob_flush();
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flush();
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}
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pclose($handle);
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/**
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* Is Windows
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*
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* Tells if we are running on Windows Platform
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* @author raccettura
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*/
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function is_windows(){
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if(PHP_OS == ‘WINNT’ || PHP_OS == ‘WIN32′){
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return true;
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}
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return false;
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}
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?>
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</body>
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</HTML>
Isn’t that simple?
There’s more than 1 way to approach a problem, and there may be better ways out there. I won’t be so cocky as to think these are by any means perfect. But they may be of help to someone who also notices the lack of documentation on little (but important) things like this.
Just remember: always sanitize your input when working with stuff like this, or your putting your system at risk.
Tags: asynchronous, php, web-programming
December 19th, 2006 at 4:05 pm
[...] http://robert.accettura.com/ar.....-with-PHP/ [...]
June 3rd, 2007 at 7:41 pm
Very nice!
It would be cooler if you could pass a callback function name.
July 15th, 2007 at 1:51 pm
This looks good; I am trying to figure out a way to get a PHP script to run in the background on a Windows server.
However, I can’t figure out your use of quotes, they seem to be uneven.
What am I missing?
July 15th, 2007 at 3:14 pm
Sean: you can use both
'or"in PHP as long as you use them as “This “.’that’. Single quotes won’t be evaluated. For example:October 21st, 2007 at 11:38 pm
[...] a background process in an OS-independent fashion you’d can use the function below (snatched from this post) [...]
December 8th, 2007 at 11:20 pm
this ain’t workin. any ideas? running on a linux host:
if this is shelling out to the system, then i don’t have shell access. is there way way to do an asynchronous call to a PHP script WITHOUT calling the shell?
thanks
December 8th, 2007 at 11:22 pm
the code:
pclose(popen(’PHP http://picnictoimpeach.us/remote.php5‘, ‘r’));
June 24th, 2008 at 8:36 am
This doesn’t work with me. I don’t know what’s wrong, but lauchBackgroundProcess() doesn’t do anything. However, if I add fgets() as in the second script, it works. But, it’s not an asynchronous call!!
July 31st, 2008 at 10:21 pm
@diiar: It’s possible your host prohibits the use of
popen()for security reasons. You should check with your admin.