Question

I want to prevent users from running my cron job manually. Apart from using an unpredictable filename I want to have some sort of check in code.

Obviously using any clientside headers is a waste of time so I thought the easiest way around this would be to detect the presence of $_SERVER['SERVER_NAME'] which as far as I know is not set in CLI.

Are there better ways of doing this?

Answer 1

Have a look at php_sapi_name. It returns the type of interface between web server and PHP.

Example:

<?php

if(php_sapi_name() == 'cli') {
  // CLI
}
else {
  // HTTP
}

For more information, and additional examples, have a look at http://www.electrictoolbox.com/determine-php-run-via-http-or-cli/.