Question

Imagine I have a script.sh on my server that asks for your name. You run the script and it says:

what is your name?

then you input your name and it prints:

hello name! 

Is it possible, using php exec, to run such a script? That is to exec the script and somehow answer the different questions it could have?

Hope I am clear. What I am really trying to do is automate the “git pull” command from our dev server but it keeps asking for a username/password. I know I could use ssh certificate login to avoid that but my question still stands. Can I use exec() and answer future questions from the script.

Answer 1

It’s worth noting that the better solution in your case is to use SSH keys for authentication. But, you might be able to pull this off with PHP Expect.

ini_set("expect.timeout", -1);
ini_set("expect.loguser", "Off");

$stream = expect_popen("git pull");

while (true) {
    switch (expect_expectl ($stream, array (
            array ("username:", USERNAME),
            array ("password:", PASSWORD),
    ))) {
        case USERNAME:
            fwrite ($stream, "usename\n");
            break;
        case PASSWORD:
            fwrite ($stream, "secret\n");
            break;

        case EXP_TIMEOUT:
        case EXP_EOF:
            break 2;

        default:
            die ("Error has occurred!\n");
    }
}

fclose ($stream);