file_get_contents() GET request not showing up on my webserver log

Question

I've got a simple php script to ping some of my domains using file_get_contents(), however I have checked my logs and they are not recording any get requests.

I have

$result = file_get_contents($url);
echo $url. ' pinged ok\n';

where $url for each of the domains is just a simple string of the form http://mydomain.com/, echo verifies this. Manual requests made by myself are showing.

Why would the get requests not be showing in my logs?

Actually I've got it to register the hit when I send $result to the browser. I guess this means the webserver only records browser requests? Is there any way to mimic such in php?

ok tried curl php:

// create curl resource
$ch = curl_init();

// set url
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, "getcorporate.co.nr");

//return the transfer as a string
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);

// $output contains the output string
$output = curl_exec($ch);

// close curl resource to free up system resources
curl_close($ch);

same effect though - no hit registered in logs. So far it only registers when I feed the http response back from my script to the browser. Obviously this will only work for a single request and not a bunch as is the purpose of my script.

If something else is going wrong, what debugging output can I look at?

Edit: D'oh! See comments below accepted answer for explanation of my erroneous thinking.

Answer 1

Use curl instead?

Answer 2

That's odd. Maybe there is some caching afoot? Have you tried changing the URL dynamically ($url = $url."?timestamp=".time() for example)?

Answer 3

If the request is actually being made, it would be in the logs.

Your example code could be failing silently.

What happens if you do:

<?PHP
if ($result = file_get_contents($url)){
    echo "Success"; 
}else{
    echo "Epic Fail!";
}

If that's failing, you'll want to turn on some error reporting or logging and try to figure out why.

Note: if you're in safe mode, or otherwise have fopen url wrappers disabled, file_get_contents() will not grab a remote page. This is the most likely reason things would be failing (assuming there's not a typo in the contents of $url).