Out of Control®

Spent a little bit tonight getting sendmail to pipe one address to a php script. My searching for solutions never gave my exact solution so here is what I did to get this working.

The setup: Ensim on RHEL4. Installed PHP script sits on the main servers site which sits in /var/www/html and not on a virtually hosted site. The script is called pipe.php and sits in /var/www/html/order/pipe/pipe.php

Step 1: Add an alias in /etc/alias for my support email. Be sure to rebuild the alias file after by typing newaliases at the command line.
support: "|/usr/bin/php -q /var/www/html/order/pipe/pipe.php"

Step 2: chmod the script so it is executable:

chmod 755 /var/www/html/order/pipe/pipe.php

Step 3: Create a symbolic link in /etc/smrsh so sendmail will know about my script. If you don't do this then sendmail will spit out the wholly ugly error message Service unavailable, and smrsh: "php" not available for sendmail programs (stat failed).

cd /etc/smrsh
ln -s /usr/bin/php ./php
ln -s /var/www/html/order/pipe/pipe.php ./pipe.php


Now all you need to do is test the functionality of your new script by sending an email to support@yoursite.com.

Note, that if you are installing a script on a virtual site you need to make the above changes in the virtual site files. So instead of adding links in /etc/smrsh you would add them in /home/virtual/siteXX/fst/etc/smrsh and instead of adding the alias in /etc/aliases, you would add them in /home/virtual/siteXX/fst/etc/aliases. Then to rebuild the aliases DB, you need to do this:

/usr/sbin/chroot /home/virtual/siteXX/fst newaliases

That is about all there was to it. The error messages I got back from sendmail took me a bit to figure out.