Dreamhost Gotcha

April 24th, 2006

I have moved a lot of my sites over to Dreamhost and have been pretty satisfied so far. The control panel is very good and you can do some neat one-click installs of popular open-source packages like WordPress.

Today I had my first PHP Gotcha on Dreamhost.

I am working on a site that uses Google Maps and I decided to try out Phoogle Maps, a PHP script that integrates Google Maps with your PHP application and also does GeoCoding based on an address. I tested the script on my dev server and everything worked great. I then started working on the rest of the app.

After uploading the scripts to Dreamhost I got an error that file_get_contents() was not allowed. After looking into it I found out that Dreamhost has disabled file_get_contents() for security reasons. Phoogle calls the Yahoo Geocoding API (since Google doesn’t provide one) and used the file_get_contents() method of doing the REST call to Yahoo. I checked out Yahoo’s developer site and found out that they also support curl() but after banging my head against the wall trying to retrofit Phoogle to use that method I looked elsewhere.

First I tried using XML-RPC to call the geocoder.us database but that was extremely slow. Then I stumbled upon ontok.com which provides a geocoding API. I grabbed their example code using SOAP and it was pretty fast and I then proceeded to hack Phroogle to call ontok.com for it’s geocoding.

So, I’m still on Dreamhost until something else doesn’t work.

:P

This entry was posted on Monday, April 24th, 2006 at 4:19 pm and is filed under Web Development.

2 Responses to “Dreamhost Gotcha”

  1. Randy Says:
    May 17th, 2006 at 9:48 am

    Did you ever get a solution? I’m attempting the same thing on Dreamhost (with WordPress and Phoogle) and was wondering if you solved the problem…

  2. papa Says:
    May 17th, 2006 at 10:36 am

    As far as I know there is no solution using Phoogle without modification since it uses file_get_contents (which Dreamhost does not allow).

    I was able to use ontok.com and nusoap.php as described at http://www.ontok.com/wiki/index.php/Geocode#PHP.

    I modified the addAddress() function in Phoogle as follows (make sure to get nusoap.php and include it in the file).  This replaces the same code that used file_get_contents:

    $server = "www.ontok.com";   // subscribers are emailed a private server with faster response times
$key = "";  // free users do not need key (limit 10 addresses), subscribers w/key (limit 200  addresses)
$q = array($address);
$soapclient = new soapclient("http://$server/geocode/soap");
$result = $soapclient->call("geocode",  array('key'=> $key, 'q'=> $q), "", "");

$pointer = count($this->validPoints);
$this->validPoints[$pointer]['lat']= $result[0]['lat'];
$this->validPoints[$pointer]['long']= $result[0]['long'];
$this->validPoints[$pointer]['passedAddress'] = $address;
$this->validPoints[$pointer]['htmlMessage'] = $htmlMessage;

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