Question

http://www.stellarwebsolutions.com/en/articles.php

I just got the .pem to work with paypal but I cannot find a way to access the .pem without putting it on my public_html/ folder which I know is probably not the best way of doing it. Is there a way of accessing the root of my ssh from php? or other areas of my ssh?

Answer 1

You can easily access any file outside of your public_html folder, you just have to make sure that the file is accessible to the web server user. For instance:

$ls -l
total 8
-rw-r--r-- 1 www-data www-data   12 Nov 26 13:08 test.txt
drwxr-xr-x 2 www-data www-data 4096 Nov 26 13:11 www

And the following php script is reading the test.txt:

<?php

$file = $_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'] . "/../test.txt"; // relative path
//$file = "/opt/nguyen/test.txt"; //absolute path
$contents = file($file);
$string = implode($contents);

echo $string;

?>

You can also put your file in your public_html folder and deny access with a .htaccess:

<Files config.inc.php>
  order allow,deny
  deny from all
</Files>