Communicating with a PHP script (and pretending I'm a browser)

[Marc Aymerich]

On Tue, Nov 11, 2014 at 5:43 PM, Larry Martell <larry.martell at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 11, 2014 at 11:00 AM, Marc Aymerich <glicerinu at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Tue, Nov 11, 2014 at 4:48 PM, Larry Martell <larry.martell at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> I have a PHP app that I want to convert to django. But I want to do it
>>> stages. All the heavy lifting is in the PHP code, so first, I want to
>>> just use templates and views to generate the HTML, but still call the
>>> PHP code. Then later convert the PHP to python.
>>>
>>> My issue is that the PHP code expects to get all it's input from the
>>> REQUEST object and I've consumed that in the view. Is there any way I
>>> can somehow supply that to the PHP code?
>>>
>>> Is there some way python can communicate like curl ... it needs to
>>> send the request string in the body of a POST request to the URL that
>>> will route to the PHP script and get the output back.
>>
>>
>> Yes,
>> I supose you can extract the needed information from the django
>> Request object and call the php script passing the needed variables as
>> environment state.
>>
>> as a guideline you can do something like
>>
>> cmd = (
>>     'REDIRECT_STATUS=200 '
>>     'REQUEST_METHOD=GET '
>>     'SCRIPT_FILENAME=htdocs/index.php '
>>     'SCRIPT_NAME=/index.php '
>>     'PATH_INFO=/ '
>>     'SERVER_NAME=site.tld '
>>     'SERVER_PROTOCOL=HTTP/1.1 '
>>     'REQUEST_URI=/nl/page '
>>     'HTTP_HOST=site.tld '
>>     '/usr/bin/php-cgi'
>> )
>> subprocess.Popen(cmd, stdout=subprocess.PIPE)
>
> Thanks very much Marc. In the example, how is the request string passed in?


Yeah, a more complete example would be

cmd = (
    'REDIRECT_STATUS={status} '
    'REQUEST_METHOD={method} '
    'SCRIPT_FILENAME={file} '
    'SCRIPT_NAME=/index.php '
    'PATH_INFO={path} '
    'SERVER_NAME=site.tld '
    'SERVER_PROTOCOL=HTTP/1.1 '
    'REQUEST_URI={path} '
    'HTTP_HOST=site.tld '
    '/usr/bin/php-cgi'
).format(
    status=request.status,
    method=request.method,
    path=request.path,
    file=my_php_path_mapper(request.path),
)

php = subprocess.Popen(cmd, stdout=subprocess.PIPE)
response, err = php.communicate()
if php.return_code != 0:
    return ResponseError(content=err)
return Response(content=response)


still incomplete and mostly wrong, but good enough to illustrate the
main pattern :)


-- 
Marc