Da:Sourcerer's Blog :: PHP Syntax Highlighting with LightTPD

PHP Syntax Highlighting with LightTPD

2010-02-09 6:08 pm 1 Comment

I recently said good-bye to good ol' Apache Webserver and jumped on the LightTPD-train. So far, I haven't regret that move. Everything I could do with Apache, I can do with Lighty as well.

However, after I set up PHP with it, I somehow missed the opportunity to have automatic syntax highlighting with .phps files. Google came up with this solution, which I found rather unstatisfying. Instead, I wanted something… cool.

So here's the Idea: Instead of opening another socket over fastcgi, let's invoke a small PHP-script via CGI which runs a given file through PHP's highlight_file function. First off, the script /usr/bin/php-source:

#!/usr/bin/php -n
<?php
 
$output = <<< EOT
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">
<html>
  <head>
    <title>Source of {$_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']}</title>
    <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
  </head>
  <body>
    <h1>Source of {$_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']}</h1>
    <hr>
EOT;
$output .= highlight_file($_SERVER['argv'][1], true);
$generated = @date('r', $_SERVER['REQUEST_TIME']);
$output .= <<< eot="" <hr="">
   <p align="center">
     Generated $generated. Almost certainly <a href="http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=referer">valid HTML 4.01 Transitional</a>.
   </p>
  </body>
</html>
EOT;
 
printf("Content-Type: text/html\r\nContent-Length: %u\r\n\r\n", strlen($output));
echo $output;

Looks complicated, doesn't it? Well, it really isn't. All this does is to invoke the PHP binary (the -n switch prevents PHP from parsing the php.ini, which speeds up things a bit), throws the response together with the help of the PHP heredoc syntax (which I think should be used more often). Last but not least, the HTTP headers Content-Type and Content-Length are set and returned along with the generated output.

Now the last thing left to do (safe for setting chmod a+x /usr/bin/php-source) is to let lighty recognize .phps files:
cgi.assign += ( ".phps" => "/usr/bin/php-source" )

Is all of this a bit overkill? Sure. Is it cool nonetheless? I think so. Of course, there are still some downsides to this approach:

There is no caching mechanism involved so far, thus the full script is rerun every time a .phps file is being pulled from the server (which is a rather minor problem, as this script doesn't take that many cpu cycles)
As lightie's cache doesn't catch the output, it isn't compressed either.

Both of these problems can be addressed within the script itself, which will be material for further blog posts ;)

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