Difference between executing php from the commandline and from the Http Side

Question

What is the difference between executing php from command line and from HTTP? Do they use the same executable such as (php.exe or php-cgi.exe ( Apache or IIS ))? Do the r

Answer 1

Though this question is very old, I'd like to extend @ Bob Fanger's a bit.

Running php files from the command line is quite trivial, you only have to keep in mind that there are some differences from running the file on a web server or on a servers command line interface:

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• No $_GET, $_POST, $_SESSION available But you can use $argv to get parameters passed as an argument to the command. The first value is allways the file name.

  For example taken this file:

  called like this:

  user@ubuntu:$ /usr/bin/php /home/user/file.php foo bar 
  

  would give you this output:

  array(4) {
    [0]=>
    string(8) "file.php"
    [1]=>
    string(3) "foo"
    [2]=>
    string(3) "bar"
  }
  

• Full file paths from your servers root required You will need to provide the full paths to your files ( e.g. for include(), require(), file_get_contents(), ... ), even though they might be in the same folder.

• different user/permission settings the files aren't getting executed by www-data user, but by the user you are logged in into your machine. This affects all your file's function calls that effect the machines file system, ( e.g. mkdir(), include(), ... ) so you have to make sure to give appropriate permission to that user.