Question

How would I make my server run a php script by triggering it manually using php? Basically I have a pretty big cronjob file that is ran every 2 hours, but I want to be able to trigger the file manually myself without having to wait for it to load (i want it to be done on the server’s side).

EDIT: I want to execute the file from a php file… Not command line.

Answer 1

You can invoke a PHP script manually from the command line

hello.php
<?php
 echo 'hello world!';
?>

Command line:
php hello.php

Output:
hello world!

See the documentation: http://php.net/manual/en/features.commandline.php

---

EDIT OP edited the question to add a critical detail: the script is to be executed by another script.

There are a couple of approaches. First and easiest, you could simply include the file. When you include a file, the code within is "executed" (actually, interpreted). Any code that is not within a function or class body will be processed immediately. Take a look at the documentation for include (docs) and/or require (docs) (note: include_once and require_once are related, but different in an important way. Check out the documents to understand the difference) Your code would look like this:

 include('hello.php');
 /* output
 hello world!
 */

Second and slightly more complex is to use shell_exec (docs). With shell_exec, you will call the php binary and pass the desired script as the argument. Your code would look like this:

$output = shell_exec('php hello.php');
echo "<pre>$output</pre>";
/* output
hello world!
*/

Finally, and most complex, you could use the CURL library to call the file as though it were requested via a browser. Check out the CURL library documentation here: https://www.php.net/manual/en/ref.curl.php

$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, "http://www.myDomain.com/hello.php");
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, 0);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true)

$output = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);
echo "<pre>$output</pre>";
/* output
hello world!
*/

Documentation for functions used

• Command line: http://php.net/manual/en/features.commandline.php
• include: https://www.php.net/manual/en/function.include.php
• require: https://www.php.net/manual/en/function.require.php
• shell_exec: https://www.php.net/manual/en/function.shell-exec.php
• curl_init: https://www.php.net/manual/en/function.curl-init.php
• curl_setopt: https://www.php.net/manual/en/function.curl-setopt.php
• curl_exec: https://www.php.net/manual/en/function.curl-exec.php
• curl_close: https://www.php.net/manual/en/function.curl-close.php