PHP: Case 4: PHP parser outside of web tree

Last updated: Fri, 27 Aug 2010

Case 4: PHP parser outside of web tree

A very secure option is to put the PHP parser binary somewhere outside of the web tree of files. In /usr/local/bin, for example. The only real downside to this option is that you will now have to put a line similar to:

#!/usr/local/bin/php

as the first line of any file containing PHP tags. You will also need to make the file executable. That is, treat it exactly as you would treat any other CGI script written in Perl or sh or any other common scripting language which uses the #! shell-escape mechanism for launching itself.

To get PHP to handle PATH_INFO and PATH_TRANSLATED information correctly with this setup, the PHP parser should be compiled with the --enable-discard-path configure option.

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Case 4: PHP parser outside of web tree

Andras Rokob <rokoba at bolyai dot elte dot hu>
18-Oct-2006 09:59


You can avoid the need of using the shell-escaping (#! ...) in all your php scripts if you set the executable bit on them and exploit the binfmt_misc support of the Linux kernels.

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Installed as an Apache module

Case 3: setting doc_root or user_dir

Last updated: Fri, 27 Aug 2010