Execute a PHP script from another PHP script

You can invoke a PHP script manually from the command line

hello.php
<?php
 echo 'hello world!';
?>

Command line:
php hello.php

Output:
hello world!

See the documentation: http://php.net/manual/en/features.commandline.php

EDIT OP edited the question to add a critical detail: the script is to be executed by another script.

There are a couple of approaches. First and easiest, you could simply include the file. When you include a file, the code within is "executed" (actually, interpreted). Any code that is not within a function or class body will be processed immediately. Take a look at the documentation for include (docs) and/or require (docs) (note: include_once and require_once are related, but different in an important way. Check out the documents to understand the difference) Your code would look like this:

 include('hello.php');
 /* output
 hello world!
 */

Second and slightly more complex is to use shell_exec (docs). With shell_exec, you will call the php binary and pass the desired script as the argument. Your code would look like this:

$output = shell_exec('php hello.php');
echo "<pre>$output</pre>";
/* output
hello world!
*/

Finally, and most complex, you could use the CURL library to call the file as though it were requested via a browser. Check out the CURL library documentation here: http://us2.php.net/manual/en/ref.curl.php

$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, "http://www.myDomain.com/hello.php");
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, 0);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true)

$output = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);
echo "<pre>$output</pre>";
/* output
hello world!
*/

Documentation for functions used

  • Command line: http://php.net/manual/en/features.commandline.php
  • include: http://us2.php.net/manual/en/function.include.php
  • require: http://us2.php.net/manual/en/function.require.php
  • shell_exec: http://us2.php.net/manual/en/function.shell-exec.php
  • curl_init: http://us2.php.net/manual/en/function.curl-init.php
  • curl_setopt: http://us2.php.net/manual/en/function.curl-setopt.php
  • curl_exec: http://us2.php.net/manual/en/function.curl-exec.php
  • curl_close: http://us2.php.net/manual/en/function.curl-close.php

you can use the backtick notation:

`php file.php`;

You can also put this at the top of the php file to indicate the interpreter:

#!/usr/bin/php

Change it to where you put php. Then give execute permission on the file and you can call the file without specifying php:

`./file.php`

If you want to capture the output of the script:

$output = `./file.php`;
echo $output;

Tags:

Php

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