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Comment by eam | Hacker News Reader

I believe the way to do it "correctly" would be to put the actual file containing the credentials in a non-public location and just do an include where you need to access it. At least that's how I do it. I could be wrong...

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If one would made a similar typo in that file, its contents will be displayed too.

A solution would be to have a .ini-like (or some other simple-to-parse format) config file and PHP code to read its contents. PHP code could be leaked, but config file contents wouldn't.

Yeah seen a few client libraries that are doing that. Even putting them in a config only file lessens the chance of something like this happening as it is modified a lot less often.

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I believe you are wrong. include()/require() would equally happily display any file's contents outside of `<?php ... ?>` scope (the case with "i?php"), within document root or not.

Edit: I've tested this:

    $ php -v
    PHP 5.2.6-3ubuntu4.6 with Suhosin-Patch 0.9.6.2 (cli) (built: Sep 16 2010 19:51:25) 
    Copyright (c) 1997-2008 The PHP Group
    Zend Engine v2.2.0, Copyright (c) 1998-2008 Zend Technologies

    $ cat test.php
    <?php
        require "/tmp/test2.php";
    ?>
    $ cat /tmp/test2.php
    i?php
        define("TEST", "test");
    ?>
    $ GET http://localhost/test.php
    i?php
        define("TEST", "test");
    ?>

Off course, but in this case, passwords would only be exposed if the config file had a miss-typed opening PHP tag. If "test.php" had it, you wouldn't be able to see the contents of "test2.php".

Yes, you are right. And in this exact case they (mis-)edited the file, that contained passwords (i.e. test2.php in my improvised example).

Sure, I was replying for this hypothetical situation that you guys ware discussing, where they would store passwords in a different file outside of webroot ...

it's always included to the document root (the bootstrap file). it doesn't matter where you're including from, a broken open tag would cause errors like this one.

If you're doing an include, wouldn't the passwords still be in a PHP file?

if the php file is printed rather than executed, the include will not be followed. You'd see the "include /path/to/inaccessible/file" but you wouldn't see the passwords within the include.

I think. I haven't seriously used php since 2003 or so.

Yes, but included files still need a <?php tag at the top, or PHP just prints them out.

That wouldn't help in this case, since a typo in the config file is making the file not be parsed as PHP.

If you want to avoid that possibility, you can use a non-PHP format (eg: YAML) and parse it.

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