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We offer a service for Magento sites that requires installation of a Magento extension. For large sites, this extension needs to run a background process which requires the exec function. Our developer claims that it is reasonable to ask our customers to enable exec on their site.

Do you php experts and administrators agree? Thanks in advance for your views.

2 Answers2

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This will surely depend from person/company to person/company.

I'd expect that if you explain it well, and if you can limit the requirement to have "exec()" available to the installation process, you'll be able to convince most of them to enable it.

Also, make sure to clarify how they can do it in your manual.

I'd only mention all this info about the requirement to have the exec() available after your install script has checked and found out it doesn't have the function availabel.

user410932
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  • Thanks for the note. In this case, the process is used to run a conversion of the product database for purposes of import to another system. The process runs multiple times per week. It is not just for installation. –  Aug 22 '11 at 15:06
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In shared environments sysadmins would not allow to change this, because it's a massive security issue.

Often hosting pannels (see plesk, ispconfig and so on) you will be able to configure cronjobs.. would that be an alternative?

Lucas Kauffman
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Flask
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  • The requirement is to run a process that converts the product database to a different format. This must be run as a background process if the product database is large. So I just don't see how a cronjob could help here, though I am open to your ideas! –  Aug 22 '11 at 14:45