Can node.js request php file as its endpoint on the same file system, not an http request?-CodePudding

I am new to node.js and am building a chat appication that is running inside an existing PHP application. I am using expressjs and also postman-request module. I can easily hit absolute urls but when I try to request a file that lives on my own file system, it fails. I have watch tutorials and read the docs and it seems like the only examples ever shown are how to hit external urls.. I can't imagine that it is not possible to hit files that reside on your own file system.

Here is code below: (in my main index.js server file)

const request   = require('postman-request');
const url = 'utils/config.php'; // this file merely echos out a json encoded string.
request(url, function (error, response, body) {
      console.log('error:', error); // Print the error if one occurred
      console.log('statusCode:', response && response.statusCode); // Print the response 
      console.log('body:', body); 
    });

Here is the error message: error: Error: Invalid URI "utils/config.php"

This is the file structure:

-node_modules
-public
-src
    -utils
        -config.php
  index.js (start for node.js - inside src folder)

Any help would be appreciated.

CodePudding user response：

Requesting refers to requesting a file from a webserver. Here, you're trying to request a file path, while the computer thinks is a non-existent URL. The PHP file is just text. It doesn't mean anything to the computer, and the PHP interpreter is what runs the PHP code. You aren't running a PHP server in this case, and you're requesting a file path, not a URL.

You have to start a PHP server first, using the php command. Make sure to pass in the URL (for example, localhost:8080/config.php), and not the file path.

If you wanted to do it entirely from the Node script, you could start a server, request the URL, and then stop the server. It would be possible to use the spawn function from the built-in child_process module (refer here). You could also use exec, but this is probably unnecessarily harder.