I need to create an ejabberd user from a PHP script. I also need to be able to add the new user to a predefined shared roster.
Should I just call ejabberdctl
using exec()
or is there a better way?
Thanks to jldupont's advice that ejabberdctl
would be the easiest solution, I pressed on through the obstacles I ran into and have a working solution.
By default, apache's user doesn't have the right privileges to successfully run ejabberdctl
(and for good reason). So in order for it to work, you have to call it with sudo
. But... sudo
requires a password, which presents 2 problems:
Solution (for Ubuntu) - add this line at the end of /etc/sudoers
:
www-data ALL= (ejabberd) NOPASSWD: /usr/sbin/ejabberdctl
The path to the sudoers file and ejabberdctl may vary for other Linux distros. This allows apache's user (www-data
) to run only ejabberdctl
with elevated privileges and without requiring a password.
All that's left is the PHP code:
<?php
$username = 'tester';
$password = 'testerspassword';
$node = 'myserver.com';
exec('sudo -u ejabberd /usr/sbin/ejabberdctl register '.$username.' '.$node.' '.$password.' 2>&1',$output,$status);
if($output == 0)
{
// Success!
}
else
{
// Failure, $output has the details
echo '<pre>';
foreach($output as $o)
{
echo $o."\n";
}
echo '</pre>';
}
?>
It's important to note that this does present a significant security risk even though you're only allowing one command to be run by www-data
. If you use this approach, you need to make sure you protect the PHP code behind some sort of authentication so that not just anybody can make it execute. Beyond the obvious security risks, it could open your server up to a Denial of Service attack.