Asynchronous shell exec in PHP

Question

I\'ve got a PHP script that needs to invoke a shell script but doesn\'t care at all about the output. The shell script makes a number of SOAP calls and is slow to complete,

Answer 1

On linux you can do the following:

$cmd = 'nohup nice -n 10 php -f php/file.php > log/file.log & printf "%u" $!';
$pid = shell_exec($cmd);

This will execute the command at the command prompty and then just return the PID, which you can check for > 0 to ensure it worked.

This question is similar: Does PHP have threading?

Answer 2

The only way that I found that truly worked for me was:

shell_exec('./myscript.php | at now & disown')

Answer 3

I also found Symfony Process Component useful for this.

use Symfony\Component\Process\Process;

$process = new Process('ls -lsa');
// ... run process in background
$process->start();

// ... do other things

// ... if you need to wait
$process->wait();

// ... do things after the process has finished

See how it works in its GitHub repo.

Answer 4

php-execute-a-background-process has some good suggestions. I think mine is pretty good, but I'm biased :)

Answer 5

I used at for this, as it is really starting an independent process.

<?php
    `echo "the command"|at now`;
?>

Answer 6

without use queue, you can use the proc_open() like this:

    $descriptorspec = array(
        0 => array("pipe", "r"),
        1 => array("pipe", "w"),
        2 => array("pipe", "w")    //here curaengine log all the info into stderror
    );
    $command = 'ping stackoverflow.com';
    $process = proc_open($command, $descriptorspec, $pipes);