Question

I’ve been reading about Phing and Ant and I’m not sure which, if either, of these tools are most useful for this scenario.

It could easily be debug statements etc, but I’ll give you our literal scanario.

We have a free and premium version of a downloadable PHP app, and rather than including just a variable hidden somewhere and then doing:

if($premium == true) {
   echo 'some additional functionality';
} else {
    echo 'basic functionality';
}

Obviously someone could then take the source and change that variable, and bang – they’ve stolen our code. And something like Ioncube etc is just totally unwieldy in my experience and support on hosting companies is just not good enough.

I would prefer something.. perhaps similar to this:

## if premium ##
echo 'some additional functionality';
## else ##
echo 'basic functionality';
## endif ##

And then I would run two builds, one setting the premium to true and one to false, which would generate two files of simply:

echo 'some additional functionality';

and

echo 'basic functionality';

It would also be very helpful to be able to only include entire files based on this same condition passed to the build app.

I can’t find a way to do this but I am open to any alternative ideas if possible.

Help would be outstanding,

UPDATE

Using the C preprocessor is great and looks like it does everything I need. However, I can’t find how to do the following 3 things.

#1 I need to remove the comments generated into the output files. Below is an example of those.

# 1 "./index.php"
# 1 "<built-in>"
# 1 "<command-line>"
# 1 "./index.php"

I haven’t found an example of how to do this in the manual page you linked me to.

#2 I need to make it recursively go through every discovered file. When I run my current code I get an error: ../target/./folder/test.php: No such file or directory

So basically I have my ‘source’ folder which I’m in, which contains a subfolder called ‘folder’ and it doesn’t recreate that, nor the files inside it (test.php)

#3 I’m sure this one is easy – how can I get it to process .js files and probably .html just to be safe as well? In one call, I mean. I assume running it on .jpg etc etc files is a bad idea..

Thanks again!

Answer 1

It’s pretty low-tech, but there is of course the C preprocessor which does exactly what you want; just bang in a couple of makefiles to call it with find or grep -R and you get a simple, easy-to-understand solution with syntax you probably know.

More detail

You probably have gcc installed already on any *nix host. Otherwise, it’ll be a standard package. Some distributions provide it separately to to gcc (like Debian’s cpp package).

The program has some simple instructions; the wiki page is a good start, and the manual has more detail than you need. Basically, it’s a matter of calling it on each file with the -E option just to do the macro processing, and then copying the output some build directory.

You can write a one-liner script to do that with find, along of the lines of find <proj dir> -type f -name '*.php' -exec cpp -E -D <FULL or RESTRICTED> {} -o <build dir>/{} \; and reference the macros FULL and RESTRICTED in your PHP, like

#ifdef FULL
    <lines for paying customers>
#endif

UPDATE To make the paths work nicely, try this out:

#!/bin/bash
cd /.../phing/source/
find . -type f -name '*.php' -exec cpp -E -D FULL {} -o ../target/{} \;

Then ../target/{} should be expanded to ../target/./index.php.

UPDATE

Added -P to remove the linemarkers (#1). Added a line to copy directory structure (#2). Changed filename match to run on js on html (#3).

#!/bin/bash
cd /.../phing/source/
find . -type d -exec mkdir -p ../target/{} \;
find . -type f -regex '.*\.(php|html|js)' -exec cpp -E -P -D FULL {} -o ../target/{} \;