How can a make a PHP script run without redirecting to it?

Question

Im making a simple web-based control panel, and i figured the easiest way for me to accomplish it would be to have PHP on the 2 machines (one being the web facing machine, the other being behind a VPN), basically I need it so when I press a button on the site on the externally facing IP of machine 1, it sends a request to the internally facing IP (eg 192.168.100.1) of machine 2 and runs the PHP file (test.php plus some $_GET data) without actually redirecting the end user to 192.168.100.1, because obviously that will time out as there is no access to it.

Answer 1

You can use cURL to send or forward HTTP requests from machine 1 to machine 2 and to receive the responses machine 2 gives you and (if needed) process those responses to show them to the user.

You could also use (XML-/JSON-)RPC or SOAP which would be a bit more elegant and extensible (more commonplace than using cURL) but it would have a higher learning curve with a bigger setup time/work.

Answer 2

If all you want is to make certain internal PHP pages accessible on the external server, you should consider setting up a reverse proxy instead of manually proxying requests with PHP.

See the Apache documentation for an example: http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/mod/mod_proxy.html

Of course this won't work if you do your authentication on the external server and/or need to execute additional PHP code on the external server before/after the internal PHP code. In that case refer to Mihai's or Louis's answer.

Answer 3

You should also be able to use file_get_contents (normally supporting the http protocol) or http_get, a function designed for simple http get requests.

It might not be the most ideal way, but should be fairly easy to do.