Determine whether PHP is being run via HTTP or CLI - Follow Up

Posted March 9th, 2008 in PHP

As a quick follow up to yesterday's post about how to determine whether PHP is being run via HTTP or CLI, I decided to do a quick post about where I found the values in the source code which are returned by the php_sapi_name() function and PHP_SAPI constant.

I downloaded the PHP source code for PHP 5.2.5 and extracted it to a temporary directory, and first did a grep on "cli" to see if I could work out where the values for php_sapi_name and PHP_SAPI were defined. I discovered they are defined in a subdirectory off the main directory called "sapi". This "sapi" directory had a further subdirectory for each sapi type, and only one of these will be compiled into PHP, depending on the configure compile settings.

In PHP 5.2.5 the subdirectories under sapi are as follows:

aolserver
apache
apache2filter
apache2handler
apache_hooks
caudium
cgi
cli
continuity
embed
isapi
milter
nsapi
phttpd
pi3web
roxen
tests
thttpd
tux
webjames

With the exception of the "tests" subdirectory, each has several files including one which contains a definition for the sapi_module_struct structure.

An example of this is:

static sapi_module_struct apache_sapi_module = {
  "apache",  /* name */
  "Apache",  /* pretty name */
  ...

The value under /* name */ is what is returned by the php_sapi_name function and PHP_SAPI constant, so it was just a matter of looking in the appropriate file in each subdirectory and finding what the name was set to for each one. This is how I compiled the list for the how to determine whether PHP is being run via HTTP or CLI post.

This is the list of files and the name value from each one: