Get current user id in php

(PHP 4, PHP 5, PHP 7, PHP 8)

get_current_user — Gets the name of the owner of the current PHP script

Description

get_current_user(): string

Returns the name of the owner of the current PHP script.

Parameters

This function has no parameters.

Return Values

Returns the username as a string.

Examples

Example #1 get_current_user() example

echo 'Current script owner: ' . get_current_user();
?>

The above example will output something similar to:

Current script owner: SYSTEM

See Also

• getmyuid() - Gets PHP script owner's UID
• getmygid() - Get PHP script owner's GID
• getmypid() - Gets PHP's process ID
• getmyinode() - Gets the inode of the current script
• getlastmod() - Gets time of last page modification

justin samuel ¶

16 years ago

to get the username of the process owner (rather than the file owner), you can use:

$processUser = posix_getpwuid(posix_geteuid());
print $processUser['name'];
?>

south dot bucks at gmail dot com ¶

10 years ago

On Centos, the Red Hat linux clone, this instruction gives the file's OWNER (the first parameter in instruction 'chown').  It does not reveal the file's GROUP.

get_current_user()  does NOT reveal the current process' user's identity.

See:  posix_getuid() - Return the real user ID of the current process

s dot bond1 at lse dot ac dot uk ¶

15 years ago

The information returned by get_current_user() seems to depend on the platform.

Using PHP 5.1.1 running as CGI with IIS 5.0 on Windows NT, get_current_user() returns the owner of the process running the script, *not* the owner of the script itself.

It's easy to test - create a file containing:

    echo get_current_user();
?>

Then access it through the browser. I get: IUSR_MACHINE, the Internet Guest Account on Windows, which is certainly not the owner of the script.

chris at ocproducts dot com ¶

2 years ago

Further testing of behaviour on Windows vs Linux...

On Linux this function is indeed returning the owner of the script. If you want to know the username PHP is running as you can use POSIX functions (or shell_exec with 'whoami').

On Windows this function is returning the username PHP is running as. Both for IIS (IUSR) and Apache (SYSTEM - which comes from the fact Apache is a service on Windows).

The behaviour on Windows is actually useful given that POSIX functions aren't available. If you need to find the owner of the script on Windows perhaps the best way is to shell_exec to use dir /Q, and parse that.

nick at little-apps dot org ¶

9 years ago

Since this only returns the file owner and not the actual user running the script, an alternative in Linux is:

$current_user = trim(shell_exec('whoami'));
?>

login dot naitsirch at arcor dot de ¶

7 years ago

If you want to get the name of the user who executes the current PHP script, you can use

$username = getenv('USERNAME') ?: getenv('USER');
echo $username; // e.g. root or www-data
?>