PHP and Xvfb

Question

I'm trying to execute firefox on a headless server to take screen shots of a website. I can do this fine from the terminal using

"DISPLAY=:12 firefox -saveimage http://www.google.com/".

The problem is when I try to do system("DISPLAY=:12 firefox -saveimage http://www.google.com"); doesn't work. I have a feeling that it's not executing in a normal shell environment. I went against my better judgment and gave the apache user an actual shell. If I su to apache and execute the command everything is fine and works as expected, but again it doesn't work from a system call. Any insight is very welcome.

Answer 1

Most likely there's some dependency on the environment variables you have set up as a shell user that isn't fulfilled by the httpd's environment. Before doing any heroics with the environment, though, I'd recommend capturing stderr from your job (adding 2>/tmp/imgcaperrlog to the end of it, for example) and seeing if it's making any complaints.

Answer 2

I found the solution.

I just needed to create a shell script that will call that for me. After playing with it for a while I got it working after adding "export HOME="/var/www/"" at the top of the script.

I hope this helps someone else.