Question

I am a newbie with shell scripting so need a few ideas on parsing a PHP file using a shell script.

Ours is a PHP project and I am improving our shell script which is used to upload code to production server.

There is one PHP config file production.settings.php which needs to be read during upload, for a few constants –

BASE_PATH (path to project root on prod server)
db_host, db_name etc. (database settings of prod database – to be used for taking a backup of the database before upload)

Question

• How to read the value of the constants?

  They are defined like this:

  define("BASE_PATH","/path/to/project/root");
  

• How to read the first uncommented value of the constant?
  Note – The constant may be defined more than once in the same file (let’s assume the possibilty – this may happen by mistake or there may be commented instances of the line)

So far I am only able to get the number of lines containing the string define("BASE_PATH" using grep in my shell script –

cd ..
PROJECT_ROOT=$PWD
result= grep -ic 'define("BASE_PATH",' $PROJECT_ROOT'/config/main.settings.php'
echo "see"$result

• Is this method of parsing good enough or a yml file would be better? Is there any shell command/snippet for doing this so that I can get the result by writing lesser amount of code?

Updates
Check my other questions for more details on this:-
Manipulating an array (printed by php-cli) in shell script,
Assigning values printed by PHP CLI to shell variables,
Initiating dynamic variables (variable variables) in bash shell script

Answer 1

just do it using the php, then call your shell script to invoke the php script.

Assuming you have your bunch of defines defined in defs.php:

define('NAME', 'JOHN');
define('HOBBY', 'FISHING');

then create a php script get_defs.php:

require_once 'defs.php';
$const = get_defined_constants(true);
foreach($const['user'] as $k => $v) {
   echo "export $k=$v";
}

then in your shell script, run it like so:

`php get_defs.php`

What happen is, get_defs.php will output bunch of export KEY=VALUE, then shell will run those commands outputted by your php get_defs.php.