PHP: open_basedir allowed path

Question

I have a few calls to is_dir on a page. They have always worked no problems.

A few days ago, the hosting company upgraded PHP from 5.2 to 5.3. Since then, all my calls to is_dir have resulted in the following error (message):

Warning: is_dir(): open_basedir restriction in effect.
File(/home/virtual/domain.com/public_html/galleries/img/002.JPG/)
is not within the allowed path(s):
(/home/virtual/domain.com:/home/virtual/_tmp)
in /home/virtual/domain.com/public_html/index.php on line 201

This puzzles me.

Clearly, according to the error message (and php_info as well), the directory /home/virtual/domain.com (with no trailing slash, so including subdirectories) is included/enabled in open_basedir, and the files that is_dir is trying to iterate through are all located in subfolders under that folder. So why are they not within the allowed paths, then? Clearly they are!

Strangely enough, this error appears to only show up when is_dir returns false, i.e., when the file is not a folder, but a regular file. It seems to iterate through directories all right without throwing errors.

Similar question posted previously here: Open_basedir restriction oddness (no solution found).

Anyone have any ideas?

(Note: Changing PHP settings is not an option, as this is a shared host and I do not have any admin access)

Answer 1

There is unfixed bug in PHP that is triggered when you open or check a path that have an existent file as prefix, and not existent part as suffix. In your example there is existent part /home/virtual/domain.com/public_html/galleries/img/002.JPG with not existent suffix / (trailing slash in path).

There is explanation that this is not a bug: “This is expected behaviour. A non path that doesn't exists (the one with the slash) is considered outside of the basedir.”, but I don't think so. This bug only triggers if first part of path is an existent file.

PHP bugs:

• "Bug #54419 :: is_dir() called on file with trailing slash to throw warning if open_basedir"
• "Bug #52065 :: Warning about open_basedir restriction while accessing a file as directory"

Answer 2

Turns out the answer was super simple, yet completely illogical:

When creating (concatenating) the paths to iterate through, I had for some reason hard-coded a trailing slash—note how the path above ends in img/002.JPG/ with a slash at the end. Removing this slash fixed the error. This also explains why it didn’t fail on directories (which are supposed to have trailing slashes), only files (which aren’t).

Going by what the PHP documentation says, is_dir() should return TRUE if the path specified represents an existing directory; and FALSE in all other cases, including if the file specified does not exist (which img/002.JPG/ doesn’t).

So I’m still a bit puzzled as to why it didn’t just return FALSE the way it used to in PHP 5.2, but instead makes this rather abstruse and frankly just downright wrong statement that the file is not within the allowed path … but at least it works again now.