Question

I’m trying to figure out the visitor’s OS is either a Windows, Mac or Linux using PHP(I don’t need the version, distro info.. etc). There’s several methods out there however they look a bit too complicated for this simple requirement.

Are there any simple ways that could provide this sort of information yet still being quite reliable?

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

For an easy solution have a look here.
The user-agent header might reveal some OS information, but i wouldn’t count on that.

For your use case i would do an ajax call using javascript from the client side to inform your server of the client’s OS. And do it waterproof.

Here is an example.

Javascript (client side, browser detection + ajax call ):

window.addEvent('domready', function() { 
  if (BrowserDetect) { 
    var q_data = 'ajax=true&browser=' + BrowserDetect.browser + '&version=' + BrowserDetect.version + '&os=' + BrowserDetect.OS; 
    var query = 'record_browser.php' 
    var req = new Request.JSON({url: query, onComplete: setSelectWithJSON, data: q_data}).post(); 
  } 
}); 

PHP (server side):

if ($_SERVER['REQUEST_METHOD'] == 'POST') { 
    $session = session_id(); 
    $user_id = isset($user_id) ? $user_id : 0; 
    $browser = isset($_POST['browser']) ? $_POST['browser'] : ''; 
    $version = isset($_POST['version']) ? $_POST['version'] : ''; 
    $os = isset($_POST['os']) ? $_POST['os'] : ''; 

    // now do here whatever you like with this information
}