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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-17T22:37:49+00:00

Short story: I’m getting an open_basedir restriction in my php script – a simple

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Short story:

I’m getting an open_basedir restriction in my php script – a simple “test writing a new file to disk” script. It SEEMS to me that I’ve got the open_basedir settings correct and the file is in the right location – but no luck, just the same error every time. I’ve searched for similar open_basedir problems on this site, but I’ve not seen any with this problem – where the directory looks right but it still throws errors.

My guesses as to what the problem is:
1) open_basedir doesn’t work the way I think it does
2) My settings are wrong and I’m just not seeing it
3) It’s actually something else, like IIS read/write permissions, etc
4) ???

Long story:

I’m working on an IIS server with PHP and I’m trying to get the following code snippet to work (a simple write file test): 

date_default_timezone_set('America/Chicago');
$myFile = 'testfile.txt';
$fh = fopen($myFile, 'w') or die("can't open file");
$stringData = "Some Text\n";
fwrite($fh, $stringData);
$stringData = "Some More Text\n";
fwrite($fh, $stringData);
fclose($fh);

This php script is located at C:\inetpub\wwwroot\WEBDIRECTORY\test_write.php on my server

Here is my php.ini setting for open_basedir:
open_basedir = c:\inetpub\wwwroot;c:\inetpub\wwwroot\WEBDIRECTORY

Whenever I open the script’s page, I am expecting to see no output, and then there should be a new file written on the server when I check back. This is what I get instead:

Warning: fopen(): open_basedir
restriction in effect.
File(testfile.txt) is not within the
allowed path(s): (c:\inetpub\wwwroot)
in
C:\inetpub\wwwroot\WEBDIRECTORY\test_write.php
on line 5 Warning:
fopen(testfile.txt): failed to open
stream: Operation not permitted in
C:\inetpub\wwwroot\WEBDIRECTORY\test_write.php
on line 5 can’t open file

I’ve tried a lot of permutations: originally the open_basedir line was just
open_basedir = c:\inetpub\wwwroot

…but that didn’t work, either.

I’ve also tried entering an absolute path for testfile.txt (c:\inetpub\wwwroot\WEBDIRECTORY\testfile.txt, etc) instead of just the name of the file itself, and I keep getting the same error message.

Any ideas? Thanks so much for your help.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Okay, so sorry to waste everyone’s time – turns out it was a server setting my system administrator had set for me. (I’m new to this so I’ll explain in general terms that I understand)

    He’d set it up so that the server would not resolve an address for any files in the web directory except certain types you expect to find on a website, such as .htm, .html, .php, .jpg, etc. The file I was trying to read was .txt.

    So, I wrote some test code:

    $test = realpath('c:\inetpub\wwwroot\WEBDIRECTORY\testfile.php');
echo ("test = $test\n");
if($test == FALSE){
 echo ("... is FALSE\n");
}

$test = realpath('c:\inetpub\wwwroot\WEBDIRECTORY\testfile.txt');
echo ("test = $test\n");
if($test == FALSE){
 echo ("... is FALSE\n");
}

    Which promptly returned this:

    test = C:\inetpub\wwwroot\WEBDIRECTORY\testfile.php
    test = … is FALSE

    So, realpath is refusing to return an address for anything ending in .txt, but is more than happy to do that for a .php file. This means that WHENEVER I put in an otherwise legal (within the basedir) filename that ends in an illegal extension, the server resolves that address not as “C:\inetpub\wwwroot\WEBDIRECTORY\testfile.txt” but as “”. And of course, an empty string is not going to be in the basedir, returning open_basedir restriction errors.

    BIZARRE! But makes sense now that I finally traced it back to its source. Thanks for all the tips! It helped me go through process of elimination and figure this one out.

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