21st April 2009

URL file-access is disabled

Many of my plugins read from XML or RSS feeds. In these cases, I read the files using the PHP file_get_contents() command. However, if you get the following error…

Warning: file_get_contents(): URL file-access is disabled in the server configuration

..then this means that your PHP is not configured to allow this command.

If you can, edit your php.ini file (usually located in /etc/php.ini) and make sure this line is in it:

allow_url_fopen = On

If you can’t edit php.ini, you can try the following…

If you don’t have one already, create a file called .htaccess in your root folder. Now add the following line:

php_value allow_url_fopen on

If that doesn’t work then, well, that’s probably down to restrictions by your host.

Life

2 responses

drk

8th June 2009

Isn’t there a way to work around this? Opening up this function in php gives hackers big advantages as 90% of the exploits out there require allow_url_fopen to be on (default is off).

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David

24th June 2009

There is indeed – look out for the new version of simple-feed-list which has a solution to this! I’ll then roll this change out to all the other plugins that uses file_get_contents.

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