traffic counter

Kilarin · Post by **Kilarin** » Sun Jul 09, 2006 4:11 pm

Please forgive me for being a moron. I really DO know a little bit about computers, but I'm obviously lost when it comes to php, pearl, and cgi scripts.

My wife wants a traffic counter for her web page. nothing fancy, just increment the count each time someone hits the main page, and display the number, of course.

I found the following example on the web:

<?php
$file = \"count.txt\";
$open = fopen($file, \"r\");
$size = filesize($file);
$count = fread($open, $size);
$count1 = $count+1;
echo($count1);
fclose($open);

$open = fopen($file, \"w\");
fwrite($open, $count1);
fclose($open);
?>

seems simple enough, open the file, read the current number, increment, write the new number, close. All nice and simple.

BUT, I need to know how to access this script from an hmtl page, and how to return the new value so it can be displayed.

any help would be greatly appreciated. (or even just pointing me to the correct documentation, I'm starting from complete ignorance here)

Thanks!

<edit>
Ah! I see, I should be able to embed the php code directly into html. Ok, nice, but it only seems to be half working. for example, if I use:

<html>
<head>
<title>PHP Test</title>
</head>
<body>
This is before the php script
<br>
<?php echo '<p>Hello World</p>'; ?>
<br>
back to regular html
</body>
</html>

I get the following as a result:

This is before the php script
Hello World

'; ?>
back to regular html

Now obviously I'm running the php script, but why does it terminate BEFORE the end tag when it hits the second single quote?

I've tried embedding the above \"counter\" script, and while runs without any obvious error, it does NOT increment the counter in the file. <sigh>

---

<edit AGAIN>
UGH! only works embedded like that if you change the ext to php. ok, back to the drawing board. I just need to run a php script, have it update the counter, and return the number to a regular old html page.

DCrazy · Post by **DCrazy** » Sun Jul 09, 2006 5:17 pm

Uh... why can't you have the file extension as PHP? Or, maybe you could configure your webserver to parse all HTML files through the PHP parser.

Here's an example (save this as example.php):

Code: Select all

<html>
<head>
<title>Counter Example</title>
</head>
<body>
<p>This is the contents of the page.</p>
<?php
$filename = 'count.txt';
$count = (int) file_get_contents($filename) + 1;
file_put_contents($filename, $count);
?>
<p>This page has been visited <?php echo $count; ?> times.</p>
</body>
</html>

Now, you must have a file called count.txt in the same directory as the webpage, and it MUST be world-readable and world-writable (under Linux this would be known as chmod 666).

Kilarin · Post by **Kilarin** » Sun Jul 09, 2006 5:22 pm

Thank you very much! I suppose I could make the home page php I guess.

Thanks, now I just have to figure out how to set the permissions at the host.

Thanks!

Jeff250 · Post by **Jeff250** » Sun Jul 09, 2006 5:27 pm

Your host may have a special directory that already has write permission outside of what's seeable by the Internet. In my case, it's a sibling directory of the directory that is shared to the Internet. For example, to implement your code for my host on the file www.mydomain.com/index.php I would need:

Code: Select all

$file = \"../database/count.txt\";

And this database directory is accessible via my ftp account, etc.

Kilarin · Post by **Kilarin** » Sun Jul 09, 2006 6:38 pm

aha! by setting up a .htaccess file with the line:

AddType application/x-httpd-php php php3 html shtml

now all html pages process through php. fantastic!

Still haven't gotten the file access figured out yet. If I've got a writeable directory, I haven't found it yet. Perhaps read write access can be set through .htaccess? More research...

Meanwhile, a question. When testing your code DCrazy, the function: file_put_contents($filename, $count);

Fatal error: Call to undefined function: file_put_contents()

Which seems odd since I can find the function documented. Its not a show stopper, I can always just call open, write, close, but doing it all in one function is kinda cool.

Could the error be because the file didn't open correctly? the error message seems all wrong for that.

DCrazy · Post by **DCrazy** » Sun Jul 09, 2006 7:39 pm

You need at least PHP 4.3.0 for file_put_contents(). If you can't get your host to upgrade, then open/write/close is the only alternative. Sorry

.

Write access needs to be given on a filesystem basis. How do you access your host? If you have shell (SSH) access, you can find the permissions on a file by doing a 'stat filename'. Linux permissions are given in three categories: owner, group, and everyone. These are each represented by a digit in a three-digit number. Read is 4, Write is 2, and Execute is 1, meaning that, for example, if the owner of a file is allowed to do all three things, that permission is expressed by 4 + 2 + 1 = 7. A file that has a permission of 666 means that the owner can read and write (4 + 2), the group that owns the file can read and write, and everyone else (e.g. the webserver) can read and write that file. For directories, the execute flag changes meaning; it means \"can open this directory\". This site does a far better job of explaining.

If you don't have SSH access to your webserver, you might be able to change the file permissions using your FTP client. I know IE's built-in client can do it (right click, Properties).

Kilarin · Post by **Kilarin** » Sun Jul 09, 2006 9:16 pm

DCrazy wrote:If you don't have SSH access to your webserver, you might be able to change the file permissions using your FTP client. I know IE's built-in client can do it (right click, Properties).

I'll try IE, cause I certainly can't seem to change the properties using cuteftp.

Thank you VERY much for the help!

DCrazy · Post by **DCrazy** » Sun Jul 09, 2006 9:52 pm

No problem at all. If you have future coding questions, you might wanna stick them in the Coders' Corner.

Krom · Post by **Krom** » Sun Jul 09, 2006 9:59 pm

/me slaps fist into palm. Ahh! Thats where this goes, thanks for reminding me DC.

fliptw · Post by **fliptw** » Sun Jul 09, 2006 11:51 pm

did you check to see if your provider already has a premade counter availible to their customers?

just a thought

Kilarin · Post by **Kilarin** » Mon Jul 10, 2006 5:52 am

DCrazy wrote:If you have future coding questions, you might wanna stick them in the Coders' Corner.

oops. I thought coding corner was for D3 specific coding issues. sorry!

And darnit, there went another chance to be nazi moderated. I never have any luck!

fliptw wrote:did you check to see if your provider already has a premade counter availible to their customers?

Yeah, it's clear that we didn't buy top end hosting. The response was "we don't provide any scripts, but for $30 we'd be happy to write any you would like"

Uhuh. Of course, I've spent a LOT more than $30 worth of time working on this, but I LIKE learning things, and it's the principle of the matter.

Kilarin · Post by **Kilarin** » Mon Jul 10, 2006 5:17 pm

Just an update. I switched to using filezilla as my ftp client. NICE program! I like it much better than my old copy of cuteftp. I could reset my file permissions to the ominous 666 with a simple right click.

I also figured out how to make the server process any html page as php. You do this by creating a file named .htaccess (that's right, no name, only an extension). That file should contain the following line (It may have others if you've already set other stuff up, I hadn't)

AddType application/x-httpd-php php php3 html htm shtml

Drop this file into your root html directory. And, tada! every .htm or .html page goes through the php interpreter. shiny!

So, now I've got it all working, thank you VERY much for your help folks. Php is interesting, I'll have to explore it further.

DCrazy · Post by **DCrazy** » Mon Jul 10, 2006 9:05 pm

Well, the PHP documentation isn't bad, but it's really only useful as a reference. It's very hard to learn PHP from the manual unless you are familiar with programming. If the concepts are programming are foreign to you, take a look into online tutorials or even a book (I'd avoid O'Reilly if I were you; their PHP book, last time I checked, was sorely out of date and chock full of errors).

The .htaccess file is great because, assuming the server admin has given you authority to do so, you can override many things using .htaccess. The most common application of .htaccess files is for HTTP authentication. Check out this page from the Apache reference for information on what exactly .htaccess files do and how you can do some neat tricks with them. Keep in mind that the version I linked was written for Apache 2.2; if you try something and it doesn't work, first make sure the appropriate AllowOverrides permissions are in effect if you can, and then make sure that you're not trying to do something that your version of Apache can't do.

By the way, this will come in handy if you ever need to debug a problem. Create a new file called \"phpinfo.php\" and put the following code in it:

Code: Select all

<?php phpinfo(); ?>

Upload it, then visit it. PHP will produce a page that gives a lot of detailed information about its configuration. Then figure out how to use .htaccess files to require authentication for that page.