PHP Runtime Environment

1. Selecting the PHP runtime
2. The sandbox
3. Automatic class loading
4. Enabled extensions
5. Dynamically loadable extensions
6. Sessions
7. Special $_SERVER keys
8. Directives with new initialization defaults
9. Disabled functions
10. Stream support
11. HTTP requests and cURL support in App Engine
12. Pure PHP
13. The PHP SDK and tools
14. PHP interpreter source code

See the PHP Getting Started Guide for an introduction to developing web applications with PHP and Google App Engine.

Selecting the PHP runtime

App Engine knows to use the PHP runtime environment for your application code when you use the tool named appcfg.py from the PHP SDK with a configuration file named app.yaml.

You specify the runtime element in app.yaml:

runtime: php55
api_version: 1
...

The first element, runtime, selects the PHP runtime environment.

The second element, api_version, selects which version of the PHP runtime environment to use. As of this writing, App Engine only has one version of the PHP environment, 1. If the App Engine team ever needs to release changes to the environment that may not be compatible with existing code, they will do so with a new version identifier. Your app will continue to use the selected version until you change the api_version setting and upload your app.

For more information about app.yaml and appcfg.py, see PHP Application Configuration, and Uploading an App.

The sandbox

To allow App Engine to distribute requests for applications across multiple web servers, and to prevent one application from interfering with another, the application runs in a restricted "sandbox" environment. In this environment, the application can execute code, use the App Engine mail, URL fetch and users services, and examine the user's web request and prepare the response.

An App Engine application cannot:

• write to the filesystem. PHP applications can use Google Cloud Storage for storing persistent files. Reading from the filesystem is allowed, and all application files uploaded with the application are available.

• respond slowly. A web request to an application must be handled within a few seconds. Processes that take a very long time to respond are terminated to avoid overloading the web server.

• make other kinds of system calls.

Automatic class loading

Both Standard PHP Library (SPL) classes and any classes that are part of the PHP SDK for App Engine are automatically loaded when needed. This means that you do not have to use include or require statements at the top of your PHP scripts.

By default, automatic class loading will occur only for classes defined in files that reside in the App Engine PHP SDK root (and, if it has been specified by --php_executable_path, your local PHP installation).

To add more paths to be searched for automatic class loading, use set_include_path in your PHP script.

set_include_path('my_additional_path' . PATH_SEPARATOR . get_include_path());

Enabled extensions

The following extensions have been enabled in the PHP runtime for App Engine:

• apc
• bcmath
• calendar
• Core
• ctype
• date
• dom
• ereg
• filter
• FTP
• gd
• hash
• iconv
• json
• libxml
• mbstring
• mcrypt
• memcache
• memcached
• mysql
• mysqli
• mysqlnd
• OAuth
• openssl
• pcre
• PDO
• pdo_mysql
• Reflection
• session
• shmop
• SimpleXML
• soap
• SPL
• standard
• tokenizer
• xdebug (included with SDK)
• xml
• xmlreader
• xmlwriter
• Zip
• zlib

Dynamically loadable extensions

The following extensions are dynamically loadable in applications that are using the PHP 5.5 or higher runtime by configuring php.ini.

• cURL - This extension uses the socket service to make requests, and is subject to that services' quota and restrictions, and is only available for applications with billing enabled.
• MongoDB - This extension allows a developer to connect to an existing MongoDB instance. It uses the socket service to make requests, and is subject to that services' quota and restrictions, and is only available for applications with billing enabled.
• ImageMagick
• intl

To enable these extensions, add directives for them in your php.ini file under extension like so:

extension = "imagick.so"
extension = "curl.so"
extension = "mongo.so"
extensio = "intl.so"

Sessions

Most web applications need a way to preserve user state information between requests. PHP provides a convenient session management layer. Sessions in App Engine work much like sessions in any other PHP application.

Setting a variable in a user's session:

session_start();
$_SESSION['Foo'] = 'Bar';

On a subsequent request by the same user:

session_start();
print $_SESSION['Foo']; // prints Bar

By default the App Engine runtime will use memcache to store session information using the MemcacheSessionHandler class. You can adjust this behavior by specifying your own session handler using PHP's session_set_save_handler() method. Memcache allows session data to be saved and retrieved quickly, meaning the overhead on your request is minimal. However data in App Engine memcache may be flushed periodically, meaning any session information will be lost. For longer-lived sessions, it may be preferable to use an alternative storage service such as Cloud SQL.

Special $_SERVER keys

PHP makes the special $_SERVER[] array available to in the request scope. In addition to the standard CGI paramaters, App Engine adds some additional useful keys.

• APPLICATION_ID - The app_id of the application set when the app was created. eg. my-wordpress
• AUTH_DOMAIN - The domain used for authenticating users with the Users API. Apps hosted on appspot.com have an AUTH_DOMAIN of gmail.com, and accept any Google account. Apps hosted on a custom domain using Google Apps have an AUTH_DOMAIN equal to the custom domain
• CURRENT_VERSION_ID - The major and minor version of the currently running application, as "X.Y". The major version number ("X") is specified in the app's app.yaml file. The minor version number ("Y") is set automatically when each version of the app is uploaded to App Engine. On the development web server, the minor version is always "1".
• DEFAULT_VERSION_HOSTNAME - The hostname of the default version of this application, eg. my-php-app.appspot.com.
• HTTP_X_APPENGINE_CITY - Name of the city from which the request originated. For example, a request from the city of Mountain View might have the header value mountain view.
• HTTP_X_APPENGINE_CITYLATLONG - Latitude and longitude of the city from which the request originated. This string might look like "37.386051,-122.083851" for a request from Mountain View.
• HTTP_X_APPENGINE_COUNTRY - Country from which the request originated, as an ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 country code. App Engine determines this code from the client's IP address.
• HTTP_X_APPENGINE_REGION - Name of region from which the request originated. This value only makes sense in the context of the country in X-AppEngine-Country. For example, if the country is "US" and the region is "ca", that "ca" means "California", not Canada.
• USER_EMAIL - Returns the email address of the user, if they have been authenticated using the Users API. If you use OpenID, you should not rely on this email address to be correct. Applications should use nickname for displayable names.
• USER_ID - If the email address is associated with a Google account, user_id returns the unique permanent ID of the user, a str. If they have been authenticated using the Users API. This ID is always the same for the user regardless of whether the user changes her email address.
• USER_IS_ADMIN - 1 if the logged in user is also an Adminstrator of the application, if they have been authenticated using the Users API. 0 otherwise.
• USER_NICKNAME - For Google Accounts users, the nickname is either the "name" portion of the user's email address if the address is in the same domain as the application, or the user's full email address otherwise. For OpenID users, the nickname is the OpenID identifier.
• USER_ORGANIZATION - An application using the Google Accounts setting can determine if the currently signed-in user is using a personal Google Account or an account which is managed by a Google Apps domain.

Directives with new initialization defaults

This table specifies directives whose initialization defaults differ from the defaults supplied with the standard PHP 5.5 interpreter available from php.net. You can override these default directives by including them in a php.ini file for your application.

Disabled Functions

Either for security reasons, or for compatibility with Google App Engine execution environment, some PHP functions have been disabled. Some of these functions can be explicitly re-enabled in the php.ini file for your application.

Permanently disabled functions

The following functions have been permanently disabled in Google App Engine:

• disk_free_space()
• disk_total_space()
• diskfreespace()
• escapeshellarg() and escapeshellcmd()
• exec()
• highlight_file()
• lchgrp(), lchown(), link(), and symlink()
• passthru()
• pclose() and popen()
• proc_close(), prog_get_status(), proc_nice(), proc_open(), and proc_terminate()
• set_time_limit()
• shell_exec()
• show_source()
• system()

Google App Engine does not include the pcntl module, and thus the functions provided by pcntl are not available to PHP programs running in Google App Engine.

tempnam() and sys_get_temp_dir() support

App Engine apps run in a security sandbox that doesn't allow for file writes directly to their own file space. (File storage instead done by Google Cloud Storage buckets.)

For this reason, App Engine's version of tempnam() returns an in-memory temp file that can be written to permanent storage later.

In this example, a temporary in-memory file is generated with the prefix "foo," then written to the default Google Cloud Storage bucket (by using file_put_contents(), which automatically calls out to GCS under the hood), appending the word "hello." The file is then reopened, the string " world" is appended, and then the file is closed. Finally, the file's contents are printed to the screen.

<?php
$dir = sys_get_temp_dir();
$tmp = tempnam($dir, “foo”);
file_put_contents($tmp, “hello”)
$f = fopen($tmp, “a”);
fwrite($f, “ world”);
fclose($f)
echo file_get_contents($tmp);

The expected output from the above calls to echo would then be:

hello world

Partially restricted functions

The Google App Engine for PHP runtime does not support the /e pattern modifier of the preg_replace() and mb_ereg_replace() functions. See the PREG_REPLACE_EVAL documentation for the deprecation notice and an example of how to update your code to use preg_replace_callback() instead.

Functions that may be manually enabled

This list specifies the PHP function that must be manually enabled by using the google_app_engine.enable_functions directive in the php.ini file for your application.

• gc_collect_cycles(), gc_enable(), gc_disable(), and gc_enabled()
• getmypid()
• getmyuid() and getmygid()
• getrusage()
• getmyinode()
• get_current_user()
• libxml_disable_entity_loader()*
• parse_str()
• phpinfo()
• phpversion()
• php_uname()
• php_sapi_name()

You can also manually disable functions by using the disable_functions directive in the php.ini file for your application.

Functions that require billing enabled

The following functions make use of Sockets and thus are only available to billing enabled apps.

• all Network Functions except gethostname()
• all Sockets Functions
• all FTP functions
• cURL, unless using cURL Lite
• MongoDB
• TCP/IP connections to MySQL servers (Cloud SQL can be used only with a UNIX socket)

Stream support

Supported PHP I/O stream wrappers

The following PHP I/O stream wrappers are supported:

• php://input
• php://output
• php://memory
• php://temp

Stream wrappers

Many functions in PHP such as fopen() or file_get_contents() take advantage of PHP's streams interface to support different protocols.

The following is a list of built-in stream wrappers that are automatically registered and available in the App Engine runtime.

• file://
• http:// (This behaves like PHP's built-in http stream handler, but uses the App Engine URLfetch service)
• https:// (This uses the App Engine URLfetch service)
• gs:// (The stream handler for Google Cloud Storage)
• zlib://
• ftp://

The following is a list of built-in stream handlers that are not supported in Google App Engine and have been unregistered.

• data://
• phar://
• ssh2://
• rar://
• ogg://
• expect://

Disabled stream transports

The following stream transports have been disabled.

• ssl
• sslv2
• sslv3
• tcp
• tls
• udg
• udp
• unix

HTTP requests and cURL support in App Engine

The PHP language provides several functions for making remote HTTP requests. These are implemented in different ways in Google App Engine, and are subject to different quotas and costs.

• Developers may use the http:// or https:// PHP stream handlers, which on App Engine are configured to use App Engine's URL fetch service to make HTTP requests and are thus subject to that services' quotas and restrictions. Many PHP functions such as file_get_contents() will use the http:// or https:// stream handlers when provided with an appopriate URL, and thus also use the URL fetch service.
• Developers can use the cURL extension to make HTTP requests. In order to use the cURL extension you must enable it in your application's php.ini file and also enable billing for your app. The cURL extension uses the Sockets service and is subject to the Socket service's quotas and restrictions.
• Developers can optionally use cURL "lite", which is a Google-supplied version of the cURL library that uses the URLfetch service instead of the Sockets service. cURL "lite" is subject to the URLFetch service's quotas and restrictions. Unlike full cURL, cURL "lite" does not support the following methods of the cURL extension:
  • curl_multi_* functions
  • support for non-standard protocols
  • support for ports other than 80 (HTTP) or 443 (HTTPS)

Before using cURL "lite", You must enable it in the application's php.ini file.

Deciding whether to use full cURL or cURL Lite depends on which cURL functions you want to use and on which underlying service (Sockets or URLFetch) provides you with the best set of features and quotas.

Pure PHP

All code for the PHP runtime environment must be pure PHP. App Engine does not allow you to upload your own C extensions.

The environment includes the PHP 5.5 standard library. Some modules have been disabled because their core functions are not supported by App Engine, such as networking or writing to the filesystem.

You can include other pure PHP libraries with your application by putting the code in your application directory. If you make a symbolic link to a module's directory in your application directory, appcfg.py will follow the link and include the module in your app.

The PHP module include path includes your application's root directory (the directory containing the app.yaml file). Modules you create in your application's root directory are available using a path from the root.

The PHP SDK and tools

The App Engine PHP SDK includes tools for testing your application and uploading application files.

PHP interpreter source code

You can download the source code for App Engine's PHP interpreter here at this GitHub repository: https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/appengine-php