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Date: Wed, 13 Mar 2013 13:37:45 -0700
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] idea: add wrapper support to mysqli_connect
From: rasmus@lerdorf.com (Rasmus Lerdorf)

On 03/13/2013 12:08 PM, Thomas Anderson wrote:
> Instead of passing localhost to mysqli_connect as the $host parameter
> I think it'd be useful if you could pass something like
> ssh2.tunnel://user:pass@example.com:22/192.168.0.1:14 to it as well.
> 
> The main advantage I see of doing that is that you could tunnel
> through SSH2, through SOCKS, through HTTP CONNECT, etc, a lot more
> easily than you currently can. Like you could have an SSH connection
> re-created every time a PHP script is called and a tunnel dynamically
> made instead of having a persistent tunnel created with autossh or
> whatever.
> 
> And even if SSH2 / SOCKS / CONNECT don't exist as built-in wrappers
> custom stream wrappers could be made. This would additionally make it
> easy for people to examine the underpinnings of MySQL. Instead of
> intercepting the packets the MySQL client sends out and placing them
> into an SSH tunnel or whatever one could just dump them to a log file
> to better understand how MySQL clients work internally.

Instead of adding all that gear to PHP itself, wouldn't it make more
sense to just use something like autossh to maintain your ssh tunnel and
have PHP connect to your tunnel endpoint? mysqli_connect() in PHP is
just a thin wrapper on top of the underlying library.

And your debugging use-case is also handled nicely by external tools
that listen on a unix-domain socket, for example.

-Rasmus