I am trying to run a shell script from a PHP script. PHP code : my shell script : After I run the PHP code in a web server (Xampp), I got this output : Although, I haven't set any password for the daemon user. And after I checked the current user running the PHP code I found it is

run shell script from php as a specified user

I am trying to run a shell script from a PHP script.

PHP code :

<? php
     $sss = escapeshellarg('virtualbox');
     $result = shell_exec("/home/hani/Desktop/launchscript.sh '$sss' 2>&1 ");
     echo "<pre>$result</pre>";
     echo "<br />";
     echo (shell_exec('whoami'));
?>

my shell script :

#!/bin/bash


sss=$1
echo 'the sudo password' |sudo -S service $1 restart

After I run the PHP code in a web server (Xampp), I got this output :

[sudo] password for daemon: Sorry, try again.
[sudo] password for daemon: 
sudo: 1 incorrect password attempt

daemon

Although, I haven’t set any password for the daemon user. And after I checked the current user running the PHP code I found it is daemon.
After many researches here and in the net, I found that daemon can’t run sudo commands.
I also found that I can fix this by editing the sudoers file and giving permissions to the daemon user to run sudo commands. However this is not a secured solution.
so my question is : How to run that script via the PHP code but not as a daemon?
PS : I tried this in order to change the current user running the PHP file :

$result = shell_exec(" sudo -u hani /home/hani/Desktop/launchscript.sh '$sss' 2>&1 ");

But I got this output in the browser :

sudo: no tty present and no askpass program specified

and the user remains daemon.

I am using Xampp in Ubuntu 16.04
Another information, I run this command in the terminal to know the owner of the ‘httpd’ service :

ps -ef | egrep '(httpd)' | grep -v `whoami` | grep -v root | head -n1 | awk '{print $1}'

the output is : daemon

Answer

I think i found a solution ( but still not sure about the security issues).
It only needs to change the default user (owner) and group of the httpd service. This can be done by editing the httpd.conf located in /opt/lampp/etc (if you are using Xampp). The default user, as I mentioned in the question, is daemon. However it has not permissions to run sudo commands, so it only needs to change that user by another one who has the permissions to run sudo commands (obviously the root user or your deafult user in Ubuntu).

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Answer