Would like to make a php get_include_files() enhancements

Question

I am interested in making an application that can automatically determine what files are included in php.

What I'm getting at is that I would like to make either a C/C++ or a C# application that runs in the background and as you're developing on your local machine, it can display included files by php as you launch pages running on your local apache.

What I thought about was to modify the function in php source code, but then I thought that would be a bad idea because then each new version of php, I'd have to go back and make the same modifications and I doubt everyone would do that.

So my question is, is it remotely possible to get all the included files that your php application used and then somehow display them to the user without using get_included_files() in your php program?

Answer 1

You could go outside of PHP completely and rely on the underlying operating system to report these details. It would be difficult to match the request to the includes though so it would only work in a development situation.

If the OS is Linux/UNIX, you can run strace on the executable (assuming using Apache with mod_php, other situations more difficult).

If the OS is Windows, I'm not sure what to use but possible one of the SysInternals utilities (most are GUI but likely there is a console equivalent of strace or a version of strace for Windows).

Another option would be to use xdebug. It would show you much more information including profiling details, memory usage, etc. It is used as a PHP extension and it does make it easy to profile a whole request in one snapshot. Once you have a trace file, you can use WinCacheGrind (Windows), kCacheGrin (UNIX, maybe OS X too) and something else for OS X. I'd suggest trying this as it is the simplest approach and is quite powerful if you are looking to get this done rather than do exploratory programming.

http://xdebug.org/

If you are interested in doing exploratory programming, my suggested route would be to look at how xdebug works and see if you can write a hook to the functions you want to trace.