Outputting an echo statement to another page without running the first page

Question

I'm using PHPMailer, and have a test.php file. Whenever this page is reloaded in the browser, the test.php file executes and sends email messages and echoes the email addresses that were used. I have a cronjob setup for this to execute once a day. I created another file body.php, that includes this:

<?php
$homepage = file_get_contents('http://www.myrealsite.com/mailer/test.php');
echo $homepage;
?>

This returns the information that I want, which is basically just an output of who I emailed, but here is the problem: Every time I reload body.php it executes the test.php file and sends email again. I want to be able to reload body.php without it running body.php. I'm new at this.

Answer 1

You can get body.php to load without sending the e-mail by adding a parameter to your call to body.php:

http://whatever.your.server.is/body.php?send=no

Then, you just need to $_GET that param and implement a simple IF:

if (!$_GET['send'] != 'no'){
    //send the e-mail

Answer 2

Okay I figured it out. My cronjob was initially this:

0 17 * * * php /var/www/html/mailer/test.php >> /var/www/html/mailer/cron_status.log

This would execute the test.php file everyday at 5pm and write to this cron_status.log file. By Removing one > and changing the cronjob to:

0 17 * * * php /var/www/html/mailer/test.php > /var/www/html/mailer/cron_status.log

deletes whats in the cron_status.log and writes to it. Then for body.php I just used:

$emailLog = file_get_contents("http://www.bartdangus.com/mailer/cron_status.log"); echo $emailLog;

Now obviously it would be better to have a log file loge everything, but my requirement that I needed to meet does not include logging everything, I just needed what happened in the past 24hrs.

Answer 3

Whenever you run body.php it will make http request to test.php and so it will send email. If I understand you correctly you wish to list all the email addresses to whom the email was sent when Cron Job ran.

So it would be better if you save the results in a separate text file and then in body.php read that file. Like this, in your cron file (test.php):

$yourFile = fopen("email_logs.txt", "a"); //make sure this file is writeable by php

$fileContents = date('Y-m-d H:i:is')."\r\n"; //write the time of file saved
$fileContents .= 'email_address_here'; //all email addresses here
$fileContents .= '\r\n=======\r\n'; //a separator line.

fwrite($yourFile, "\n". $fileContents);
fclose($yourFile);

In your other file to read the emails, do:

$emailLog = file_get_contents("http://www.myrealsite.com/mailer/email_logs.txt");

Answer 4

What you're asking is impossible. You can't run a file that contains phpmailer code using file_get_contents() and using it in a cron job. You can, but that's why it's not working for you in the way you hoped it would.

• It's one or the other.

Sidenote: The method and array used to catch the addresses of each email is unknown.

So, base yourself on the following, which writes to a file and reads from it, and checks if the file first exists.

body.php

<?php 

if(file_exists('/path/to/email_sent_to.txt')){
    $show_emails = file_get_contents('/path/to/email_sent_to.txt');
    echo $show_emails;
}

Your cron job file and to the effect of:

<?php 

// your phpmailer code

$emails = array("email1@example.com", "email2@example.com", "email3@example.com");

foreach($emails as $value) {

    $value = $value . "\n";
    $file = fopen("email_sent_to.txt", "a");
    fwrite($file, $value);
    fclose($file);

}

which the above will write to file as:

email1@example.com
email2@example.com
email3@example.com

---

Footnotes:

You may want to use a date/time format for your file naming convention, otherwise that file may get rather large over time. This is just a suggestion.

I.e.:

$prefix = "email_logs_";
$date = date('Y-m-H');

$time = date('h_i_s'); 

$logfile = $prefix . $date . "_" . $time . ".log";

which would create something like email_logs_2016-05-23_11_59_40.log.

Then read your file based on the most currently written file using PHP's filemtime() function.

• http://php.net/manual/en/function.filemtime.php

Borrowed from this question and using a different approach while using a date/time file naming convention as I already suggested you do:

How to get the newest file in a directory in php

$files = scandir('logfiles', SCANDIR_SORT_DESCENDING);
$newest_file = $files[0];