How to execute a shell script in PHP?

Question

I have a script in /var/www/myscript.sh which creates folders and runs the command svn update for my projects. I need to execute this script by calling it in a PHP file in the browser (i.e. Localhost/test.php). I tried using functions shell_exec() and exec() but those did not work. I ran my shell script in terminal with su www-data && ./myscript.sh and it worked. What else am I missing?

<?php $output = shell_exec("./myscript.sh"); ?> 

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Update 5/4/2011:

I added www-data ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD:ALL to /etc/sudoers and it works, but this is very insecure. Is there another way to do this?

Answer 1

Several possibilities:

• You have safe mode enabled. That way, only exec() is working, and then only on executables in safe_mode_exec_dir
• exec and shell_exec are disabled in php.ini
• The path to the executable is wrong. If the script is in the same directory as the php file, try exec(dirname(__FILE__) . '/myscript.sh');