On the $config variable

sparkvilla

Hi all. I am running few basic command on the PHP shell. I have few questions on the $config variable:

How can I dump $config variable to a file using php?
Which will be the format of the file that contains the content of the $config variable? It is not php, it is not xml, so.. what is it?
Would I be able to parse the content of the file with python?

Thank you.

jimp

Why would you want to do that?

You can just parse /conf/config.xml direcly with XML functions in python if you're just interested in the values. $config is just a PHP representation of the contents of config.xml.

If you have to, you could dump it using something like

file_put_contents("/root/somefile.txt", var_export($config, true));

Which would be human and PHP readable.

Or use serialize() for machine readable.

But seriously… just read the XML directly. Don't bother adding more PHP to the mix.

sparkvilla

Thank you for the answer. I will use the config.xml file to gether info on the configuration. My idea is to change the configuration file remotely, i.e. through Ansible, interacting with pfSense with php commands (no-web interface).

jimp

That won't be quite so simple, lots of other gotchas there (the config.cache, reloading specific areas, etc).

There are already threads about doing what you propose.

sparkvilla

I'll try..Could you point me to one of those threads? thanks again