How to get the home directory from a PHP CLI script?

Question

From the command line, I can get the home directory like this:

~/

How can I get the home directory inside my PHP CLI script?

Answer 1

PHP allows you to get the home dir of any of the OS users. There are 2 ways.

Method #1:

First of all you gotta figure out the OS User ID and store it somewhere ( database or a config file for instance).

// Obviously this gotta be ran by the user which the home dir 
// folder is needed.
$uid = posix_getuid();

This code bit can be ran by any OS user, even the usual webserver www-data user, as long as you pass the correct target user ID previously collected.

$shell_user = posix_getpwuid($uid);
print_r($shell_user);  // will show an array and key 'dir' is the home dir

// not owner of running script process but script file owner
$home_dir = posix_getpwuid(getmyuid())['dir'];
var_dump($home_dir);

Documentation

Method #2:

Same logic from posix_getpwuid(). Here you gotta pass the target OS username instead of their uid.

$shell_user = posix_getpwnam('johndoe');
print_r($shell_user); // will show an array and key 'dir' is the home dir

// not owner of running script process but script file owner
$home_dir = posix_getpwnam(get_current_user())['dir'];
var_dump($home_dir); 

Documentation