PhantomJS on server - PHP exec unable to fork

Question

Problem: Getting Warning: exec(): Unable to fork with hello.js

Question: How can I make it work?

Description: I'm trying to make phantomJs work on a Windows server. I have the following files on the public_html folder:

phantomjs.exe
index.php
hello.js

Where index.php is simply:

<?php $response = exec('phantomjs.exe hello.js');

And hello.js is:

console.log("Hello world!");
phantom.exit();

When I run index.php I get the following error:

Warning: exec(): Unable to fork [phantomjs.exe hello.js] in D:\sites\creditflow.com\public_html\index.php on line 1

The code above is currently hosted here.

Question: how can I make it work?

Dan W · Accepted Answer · 2015-02-21 21:44:51Z

1

Could be permissions on phantomjs.exe, have you tried changing them? http://php.net/manual/en/ref.exec.php#32601 Could be helpful

Also, have you tried using a full path?

Must say however, an exe in public_html sounds risky to me.. I think (with the wrong permission config) that anybody could execute that remotely, and possibly pass a path to any file on your server, including non public files.

Cannot think of any reason it would need to specifically go there rather than in a safer non web accessible location.

edited Feb 21, 2015 at 21:44

answered Feb 21, 2015 at 21:07

Dan W

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1 Comment

Guilherme Salome Over a year ago

Unfortunately I don't have a lot of control over the server at the moment, so permissions could be an issue. However, I could change the permissions on all files to 766, but I still got the same error. Right now I'm trying to create a WAMP on EC2 to further investigate on that. I also tried using full paths in many different ways, but the problem still occurred. On the security issue, I'm new to this thing so I really don't know how to deal with it, do you know any good resource to read about websecurity?

carla · Accepted Answer · 2017-08-11 17:53:21Z

0

In fact this is probably related to memory, not permissions. Here a question regarding the same issue.

It could be a leak somewhere else in your code, however phantomjs itself has some issues with memory consuming.

answered Aug 11, 2017 at 17:53

carla

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