During a support issue with a user of one of my web applications I made a fairly important discovery about GoDaddy.com and how they have PHP installed on their servers. Many functions – 44 last time I looked – are disabled. Now, this may just be with their economy package and they have them enabled on their higher packages as an incentive to upgrade, but it caught me off guard.
What triggered the problem was that during my installation script it seemed that the SQL file that should have created tables and filled in default values was doing neither. It turns out that most of the file functions are disabled and my script was unable to open the SQL file.
The functions I really needed were fopen(), fread(), and fclose(). Of course there were several others that were important, just not impossible to work around if needed.
My Solution?
Well, it’s not a good one. The first step of the index script is to check for the half dozen or so functions that are critical to my program that were disabled on GoDaddy. If any of these functions does not exist the script displays an error message and exits. Unfortunately that’s the only way I could think of to handle the problem. With the file functions disabled there really isn’t a way to get the data I needed.
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