Question

virtual() can be used only when running PHP as an apache module. My shared hosting runs it as CGI so it doesn’t work. Is there any other method to do it?

Note: the subrequest is for static files that I’d like to let Apache serve (for performance, HTTP-headers caching, etc.). Right now this is handled by using an HTTP redirect (that I want to get rid of) issued by the PHP script.

Answer 1

In the end I actually found out a way to do this by using the X-Sendfile Apache module.
Sending a file is then easy as executing

header("X-Sendfile: $local_file");
exit();