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Symptom

Some applications were not developed by the developers for shared hosting, although they can basically be used there.

One such application is Nextcloud. The developers assume that you can not only call the application in the browser, but also control it from the Linux command line with the help of maintenance scripts. Nextcloud contains e.g. a command line tool "occ" with which some maintenance tasks can be carried out. Sometimes you need "occ" to repair the Nextcloud database or to maintain indexes after a failed update.

In other cases and with other applications, too, it can be helpful to be able to execute PHP scripts on the Linux command line. Above all, users want to be able to freely choose the PHP version with which a script is executed. However, because in a shared hosting environment only one system serves all customer accounts on the same machine with the same software, this is not possible here.

Solution

In order to be able to execute a PHP script on the Linux command line with your desired PHP version, you take a little detour: You create an inactive “scheduled task”. This has several advantages. Not only are you free to choose the PHP version, but the web space control center also ensures that no access permissions are violated.

This is how it works (the example uses Nextcloud "occ", but the solution also applies to all other PHP scripts in your web space):

1. Log into the webspace control panel.

2. Click the “Websites & Domains” menu.

3. Click on "Scheduled Tasks" in the right column.

4. Click the "Add Task" button.

5. Remove the check mark from the "Active" selection box.

6. For the task type, select: "Run a PHP script".

7. Enter the path and name of your PHP script under "Script path". The path begins in your FTP root directory. For example, if you have a Nextcloud installation in httpdocs, you would enter "occ" to run the script:

httpdocs/occ

8. To the right of the script path, you can enter the parameters that are to be transferred to the script. For example, if you want to have a Nextcloud database repaired, you would enter

maintenance:repair

9. Select your preferred PHP version from the “Use PHP version” dropdown box. For the Nextcloud "occ" script, this must be exactly the PHP version that your Nextcloud installation uses. In "Websites & Domains" you can use the PHP icon to check which PHP version is set for your website.

10. Click the "Run Now" button.

The script will run exactly as if you run it from the Linux command line, in the example above

/usr/bin/php ./httpdocs/occ maintenance:repair

The webspace control panel enters the path to the appropriate PHP version in the command for you. It also monitors the safe execution of the script and shows you feedback on the execution of the task.

Since you have set the "scheduled task" to "inactive", it will not be executed automatically at a certain time, but only when you click "Run Now". For frequently recurring tasks, you can save the PHP command lines and run them later with a click of the mouse.

Overview of frequently asked questions