Question

Php script running but not working

I’ve installed php using this guide. It worked and my script seems to work with

php /var/www/html/folder/file.php 

At least it doesn’t give me an error message. The script sends a get request to an outside API which is then written to a .txt file. I then read it on page load with javascript and display it on my site. The problem is that none of the text files get updated. It works on my local apache server that I set up on my computer, but not on my website. I know it’s probably better to use mySQL but that’s not something I know how to do (though I am planning to learn).


Submit an answer


This textbox defaults to using Markdown to format your answer.

You can type !ref in this text area to quickly search our full set of tutorials, documentation & marketplace offerings and insert the link!

Sign In or Sign Up to Answer

These answers are provided by our Community. If you find them useful, show some love by clicking the heart. If you run into issues leave a comment, or add your own answer to help others.

Ryan Quinn
DigitalOcean Employee
DigitalOcean Employee badge
April 5, 2018
Accepted Answer

The guide you followed is for a LAMP (Linux Apache MySQL PHP) environment but the command you are showing is attempting to run a php script from the command line. Ubuntu packages the command line and apache(mod_php) versions separately.

To install the CLI version of PHP you would need to run:

sudo apt-get update;
sudo apt-get install php-cli;

This comment has been deleted

    Try DigitalOcean for free

    Click below to sign up and get $200 of credit to try our products over 60 days!

    Sign up

    Get our biweekly newsletter

    Sign up for Infrastructure as a Newsletter.

    Hollie's Hub for Good

    Working on improving health and education, reducing inequality, and spurring economic growth? We'd like to help.

    Become a contributor

    Get paid to write technical tutorials and select a tech-focused charity to receive a matching donation.

    Welcome to the developer cloud

    DigitalOcean makes it simple to launch in the cloud and scale up as you grow — whether you're running one virtual machine or ten thousand.

    Learn more
    DigitalOcean Cloud Control Panel