How to tell if PHP is running under a browser or was invoked as a standalone script

Question

What would be the cleanest method to tell if PHP has been invoked via a POST for example and not from html (under a web broser)

Thanks,

possible duplicate of [What is the canonical way to determine commandline vs. http execution of a PHP script?](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/173851/what-is-the-canonical-way-to-determine-commandline-vs-http-execution-of-a-php-sc) — Pekka, Sep 30 '10 at 11:30
To make things clear ... a POST as in the HTTP/1.1 Method is not the same as CLI ... what do you mean by stand-alone script? — ChrisR, Sep 30 '10 at 11:32

score 5 · Accepted Answer · answered Sep 30 '10 at 11:37

If I understand your question correctly, it's not about http vs. command line call, but rather browser vs. "non-browser" (e.g. via curl, wget etc) call. There's no way to check this, because wget etc are technically browsers, they just don't happen to have a GUI. You can try checking HTTP_USER_AGENT, but this is totally unreliable, because there's no way to enforce a client to identify itself correctly.

score 2 · Answer 2 · edited May 23 '17 at 12:26

2

This has been answered in another Q: What is the canonical way to determine commandline vs. http execution of a PHP script?

edited May 23 '17 at 12:26

Community

1
1

answered Sep 30 '10 at 11:27

TuomasR

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score 1 · Answer 3 · answered Sep 30 '10 at 11:29

function __get_started_from_cli_state()
{
    return substr(php_sapi_name(), 0, 3) == 'cli';
}

function __get_started_from_cgi_state()
{
    return substr(php_sapi_name(), 0, 3) == 'cgi';
}

function __get_started_from_browser_state()
{
    return !(__get_started_from_cli_state() ||
             __get_started_from_cgi_state());
}

How to tell if PHP is running under a browser or was invoked as a standalone script

3 Answers3