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Why does phpinfo() output html in a LEMP stack?

I got a LEMP stack running, but do not understand why a html page is displayed. I got the following in info.php:

<?php
phpinfo();
?>

I get the following when executing it directly:

php info.php | head -n 2
phpinfo()
PHP Version => 7.0.18-0ubuntu0.16.04.1

But when I access info.php through nginx with fastcgi accessing php, a full blown html page is returned, incuding links and a php logo. The start for example:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"><head>
<style type="text/css">
body {background-color: #fff; color: #222; font-family: sans-serif;}

Whenever I use other php scripts that echo some text, this does not happen and only text is returned.

Can anyone explain why this happens?

Solution

  • That's the way PHP was built. From the documentation:

    Note: phpinfo() outputs plain text instead of HTML when using the CLI mode.

    PHP detects what context it's running in, and acts appropriately. Nothing more to it.