Trouble running subversion through PHP's exec

Question

I can run an svn command from the command line but not from within a PHP script. Significantly, I can run the PHP script on my Mac and it returns the expected data just fine but when I upload it to my Linux server it won't work (from within PHP... I can run the svn command from the terminal). I'm pretty sure this is a user or permission issue of some sort.

I can run (from command line):

svn log http://whatever.com/svn/foo

but none of the following work (run separately... not all together like this):

exec('svn log http://whatever.com/svn/foo');
exec('svn log http://whatever.com/svn/foo',$out);
exec('/usr/bin/svn log http://whatever.com/svn/foo');

However this works:

exec('ls');

I assume the problem is that when I run from the command line I am running as root whereas when I run from PHP I am running as the apache user (www-data)? Perhaps? Any suggestions on how to be able to run exec('svn log http://whatever.com/svn/foo');?

Changing permissions to 777 (just trying to get it working!) does not help.

Answer 1

When you run Subversion from the command line, you are running it as yourself. That is, you are the user logged in and running the command.

If you are running Php from a webpage, it is the user who is running the Apache httpd daemon (which could be "apache", "www", "runwww", etc. depending upon the platform). The user running the PHP script may not have read/write permissions to the Subversion repository.

You have two ways of solving this:

• Provide your program with user credentials via the --username and --password command line parameters.
• Setup the user running httpd with Subversion credentials. Once it is done, it'll never have to be done again. This way, your PHP code doesn't contain login credentials.

Answer 2

Here are a couple of threads that I think might help:

Thread 1 (read as there is more):

$cmd = '/usr/bin/svn list --config-dir /some/place file:///var/subversion/devfoundry/ 2>&1';
exec($cmd, $output); 
$output = implode("\n", $output) . "\n";
echo $output;

Thread 2:

The Subversion error "svn: Can't recode string" can be caused by the locale being wrong. Try

<?php
    putenv('LANG=en_US.UTF-8');
?>

(or whatever your preferred locale is) before you call shell_exec()

Thread 3: PHP Interactive Shell

Answer 3

May be you can use a svn client for php. Here is a good one http://code.google.com/p/phpsvnclient/