PHP Asyscon Extension

PHP Asyscon is an almost trivial PHP extension to add constants at start time of the engine, for the entire runtime, with values related to the information the uname system call returns, like hostname.

The name Asyscon, is short for Automatic SYStem CONstants

If anybody comes up with additional + easily accessible system related material of interest to PHP scripts, that might be added to this extension.

php.ini Settings

When Asyscon is enabled, using the usual extension=asyscon.so somewhere, you have available a number of php.ini settings, each giving the name a constant for a certain part of the uname information should have.

In other words: you, the administrator, decide what information is important to your PHP scripts, and how each constant should be named.

Without any of these php.ini settings, the extension does nothing at all.

• asyscon.host-name gives you the local host name, like what you see when running 'uname -n'. But NOTE that for consistencies sake, the name is always stripped at the first dot.
• asyscon.host-fqdn gives you the fully qualified host name. If running 'uname -n' shows you something with a dot in it, that will be used; otherwise the 'uname -n' name will be completed by what running 'domainname' shows you, with a dot in between.
• asyscon.host-domain gives you the local domain name. That will be either the thing shown when running 'domainname', if that is not empty, or possibly the stuff after the first dot in 'uname -n' output, if present.
• asyscon.os-name gives you the name of the OS, like 'uname -s'.
• asyscon.os-release gives you the release of the OS, like 'uname -r'.
• asyscon.os-version gives you the version of the OS, like 'uname -v'.
• asyscon.os-machine gives you the machine type of the OS, like 'uname -m'.

Some operating systems do not support the uname system call. That will be detected at compile time. The php.ini settings are then simply ignored - the constants will NOT be set. This might change in the future, if somebody extends the code to cover these systems.

Some operating systems do not support the domainname information in the uname syscall. That will be detected at compile time, and the domainname will then simply only be derived from the part after the first dot of the hostname.

Installation

• Download asyscon source package
• Unpack asyscon source package
• Go to asyscon folder and type "phpize && ./configure && make"
• Maybe run the included test cases: make test PHP_EXECUTABLE=/usr/bin/php5 TEST_PHP_ARGS="-q"
• If all is well, run "make install", as root, to copy modules/asyscon.so to your PHP extension directory.
• Make sure you have extension=asyscon.so in your php.ini, or in a file like /etc/php5/conf.d/asyscon.ini
• Add configuration php.ini or somewhere else, which lists the names of the constants you would like to have set, as detailled above.