Question

I can run an svn command from the command line but not from within a PHP script. Significantly, I can run the PHP script on my Mac and it returns the expected data just fine but when I upload it to my Linux server it won’t work (from within PHP… I can run the svn command from the terminal). I’m pretty sure this is a user or permission issue of some sort.

I can run (from command line):

svn log http://whatever.com/svn/foo

but none of the following work (run separately… not all together like this):

exec('svn log http://whatever.com/svn/foo');
exec('svn log http://whatever.com/svn/foo',$out);
exec('/usr/bin/svn log http://whatever.com/svn/foo');

However this works:

exec('ls');

I assume the problem is that when I run from the command line I am running as root whereas when I run from PHP I am running as the apache user (www-data)? Perhaps? Any suggestions on how to be able to run exec('svn log http://whatever.com/svn/foo');?

Changing permissions to 777 (just trying to get it working!) does not help.

Answer 1

Here are a couple of threads that I think might help:

Thread 1 (read as there is more):

$cmd = '/usr/bin/svn list --config-dir /some/place file:///var/subversion/devfoundry/ 2>&1';
exec($cmd, $output); 
$output = implode("\n", $output) . "\n";
echo $output;

Thread 2:

The Subversion error “svn: Can’t
recode string” can be caused by the
locale being wrong. Try

<?php
    putenv('LANG=en_US.UTF-8');
?>

(or whatever your preferred locale is)
before you call shell_exec()

Thread 3: PHP Interactive Shell