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I want to track and save to my local DB any event where my website's users click on links. the user ID is saved in session information.

Links are structured like this: example.com/go.php?d=1234 , with 1234 being example for concrete link user want to go to.

Right now, on go.php, I use _GET and then redirect to user to the actual link (by searching another DB table to find the matching link for the d value, such as 1234.

I want the tracking to happen simultaneously, on server side only, in order to avoid slowing or undermining the redirection process of the user.

Therefore, my idea is to have go.php call another php script on my localhost - track.php. And inside track.php do an INSERT with the user's data into another DB table, so if anything fails with the insertation, user will not be affected.

How can I pass data like the user's ID and the link ID that was clicked (and other info I plan to collect, such as user agent, resolution, referrer page, etc), under those requirements?

  • I can't use session since session are stored on the user's machine and I don't want user to have any interaction with this script, and even if session is stored on server, there can be multiple users who will click the same time on links and overwrite the session info I guess.

  • I don't want to pass info via a URL and use _GET to extract it, since I don't want to use an HTTP request, it makes no sense to use one (speed and security perspective), if everything should happen on my local host.

  • I don't want to use an include since like I said, if anything in the track.php code will fail, if it is included within go.php, this can cause fatal error and undermine the redirection process.

EDIT:

Is it possible for example to trigger track.php, the same way as cron jobs are triggered?

For example, If one can set a cron job like:

php /home/user/backend/track.php user_id=1 link_id=1234 user_agent="mozilla 1.7/85"

and pass parameters this way, so maybe in script I can do something like:

some-php-function(php /home/user/backend/track.php user_id=1 link_id=1234 user_agent="mozilla 1.7/85")

So maybe something like:

shell_exec(php /home/user/backend/track.php user_id=$u_id link_id=$l_id user_agent="$agent");

thenondeveloper
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    Your requirements don’t make much sense. If you want to get the PHP code in one file executed “from” another - then your two basic options simply _are_ either an HTTP request, or and include on the file system level. – CBroe Mar 13 '20 at 12:07
  • "_there can be multiple users who will click the same time on links and overwrite the session info I guess_" Then sessions would make no sense. https://www.php.net/manual/en/intro.session.php. If you don't want to use _GET (for whatever reason) you could still POST data to an URL – brombeer Mar 13 '20 at 12:10
  • @CBroe says session makes sense, kerbholz say they dont. I don't want to use any URL to do this. Please see my EDIT, I explain in it what I'm trying to get at. – thenondeveloper Mar 13 '20 at 12:18
  • What if I use `shell_exec` for example? (see my edit) as opposed to include, I suppose it does not create any dependency. – thenondeveloper Mar 13 '20 at 12:20
  • (My comment was less about whether sessions might help here, and more about that _your_ assessment of them regarding the current problem, seemed to be based on rather little understanding of how they actually work to begin with.) – CBroe Mar 13 '20 at 12:44
  • A proper solution to this will probably rather be something along these lines, https://stackoverflow.com/questions/15273570/continue-processing-php-after-sending-http-response - redirect the user, close the connection, make your database entry _afterwards_. – CBroe Mar 13 '20 at 12:44
  • interesting. can you explain the concept of "closing the connection"? – thenondeveloper Mar 13 '20 at 12:48

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