Livecode.org email addresses and talking to PHP from LiveCode Server

One of the things we’ve introduced recently was the LiveCode Membership product, one of the benefits of which is a livecode.org email address of your choosing. This meant that we needed to set up the livecode.org domain to use with email accounts on one of our servers, and then set up some way for the livecode.com store to communicate with it in order to set up the email accounts. This is made simpler by the fact that we make use of cPanel/WHM, meaning we can use the cPanel API for this kind of operation.

The cPanel API is written in PHP and allows you to perform a wide range of operations. The problem here, of course, is that it’s written in PHP – we want to talk to the API using LiveCode Server! So this raises the question – how do we interact with PHP scripts from LiveCode Server? This is a question that comes up every now and again for the reason that many utilities and systems are written in PHP.

In this instance, the API performs and action and returns a result (as either JSON or XML). For very simple instances where we just want to, for example, be able to get a list of all email accounts, we can set up the PHP script that performs the relevant API call, and then execute it directly using shell() from our LiveCode Server script:

...
put shell("php check_email_accounts.php") into tAccountsXML
...

This method is appropriate when we don’t need to pass information to the script, and where we also don’t need to use the CGI environment, which isn’t initiated if we execute it in command-line mode. Another way is to set up the script to handle data posted to the script:

...
post "user=" & tUser & "&pass=" & tPass & "&auth=r34l1ygr34TaU7h5tr1nG" to url("http://mail.somelivecodedomain.com/create_mail_script.php")
...
    

The script that the data is posted to should then be set up to take the values from $_POST and use them as parameters in the API call.
This way we also have access to the CGI environment in the PHP script should we need it. Security can be accomplished quite easily as we know where the post is coming from and can use .htaccess directives to restrict how the file can be accessed, as well as the standard types of script-based authentication we might use with this.

Ideally, in this instance, we would set up a single PHP script to which we would post the name of the desired API function and a list of parameters, which would be processed into the correct format and then passed directly into the api query function into that script. In this way we could implement a single callCPanelAPI() function in our LiveCode Server script.