Question

I am trying to enable foreign key constraint of sqlite database from my php script.

I tried :

shell_exec('sqlite ex.db');

shell_exec('PRAGMA foreign_keys = ON');

echo $isEnabled = shell_exec('PRAGMA foreign_keys');

But I am not getting $isEnabled as 1 . In fact I am not getting anything as output.

Thanks.

Answer 1

Why you dont use the built-in SQLite driver?

$con = new SQLite3('ex.db');
$con->exec('PRAGMA foreign_keys = ON;');
var_dump($con->query('PRAGMA foreign_keys;')->fetchArray());

According your problem: shell_exec() (as the name suggest) executes shell commands. This means, that you try to execute three (!) shell commands, but you want to execute one and then you want to execute 2 more commands within the interactive sqlite3-process you started before. This is not possible this way. Maybe you can play around with stdin, but because PHP comes with SQLite3-support I don’t see a reason to make it more complex, that it needs to be.