X-elFinder GUI-based Composer Update and User's home

[gigamaster]

X-elFinder control panel provides a GUI-based control panel to run Composer and update vender for cloud storage.

Most local development tools - Apache/NGINX, MySQL/MariaDB, PHP - can determine the user's home, depending on the platform Linux, MacOS or Windows. However some other virtualisation tools, Docker containers, virtual machines, etc. fail to run composer.
Often due to users path e.g. c:\Users\<username>\AppData\Roaming\<myapplication>\
or misconfiguration of openssl extension.

Composer uses an environment variable, getUserDirectory in composer/Platform package:

    /**
     * @throws \RuntimeException If the user home could not reliably be determined
     * @return string            The formal user home as detected from environment parameters
     */
    public static function getUserDirectory()
    {
        if (false !== ($home = getenv('HOME'))) {
            return $home;
        }

        if (self::isWindows() && false !== ($home = getenv('USERPROFILE'))) {
            return $home;
        }

        if (function_exists('posix_getuid') && function_exists('posix_getpwuid')) {
            $info = posix_getpwuid(posix_getuid());

            return $info['dir'];
        }

        throw new \RuntimeException('Could not determine user directory');
    }

    /**
     * @return bool Whether the host machine is running a Windows OS
     */
    public static function isWindows()
    {
        return defined('PHP_WINDOWS_VERSION_BUILD');
    }

X-elFinder GUI-based update of composer and vendor with proper User's home path on Windows.
NOTE : Input examples to run PHP CLI command could be extended or provide instructions.

[gigamaster]

After not working on this for a long time, I finally decided to definitely answer this question.

Arcesilas, a french developer, pointed out some usefull environment variables defined on Windows:
USERPROFILE, APPDATA, LOCALAPPDATA. These variables are easily accessible via getenv() function:

getenv('USERPROFILE');

USERPROFILE exists on any Windows, and it seems to be reliable, according to https://learn.microsoft.com/fr-fr/windows/desktop/shell/knownfolderid

So, on Windows, to store data for the current user, check : APPDATA and LOCALAPPDATA

Arcesilas released a package to make these tools reusable: https://github.com/Arcesilas/Platform

[gigamaster]

Pear
Get system folder locations.

Description
System_Folders provides methods to get the locations of various system folders like home directory, desktop folder and "My documents". You can use it on nearly every operating system: It works on Linux, Windows and Mac OS; allowing you to write OS independent programs.

The methods return a string of the directory (with trailing slash) if the directory can be determined, and NULL if it fails or isn't available on the system. For example, the "Shared Documents" folder exists on Windows only. If you run getSharedDocuments() on a Mac or Linux, the method will return NULL.

The class does heavy use of environment variables. That means it is very likely that the methods fail when running in a php server module (e.g. apache) because there is user information available. Using them on command line (cli) scripts gives best results, as the class is meant to be used for such ones

https://pear.php.net/manual/en/package.system.folders.intro.php