How to set a permission to call a Python script from PHP?

Question

I connected an Arduino Nano via USB to my Raspberry PI3. The Arduino is programmed to send (via serial) 16 bytes of information every 500 milliseconds. In this RPi3 I have Python, Apache2 and PHP5 installed on my Raspbian Jesse, so I wrote the following code and save in var/www/html/ler.py :

import serial
comunica = serial.Serial('dev/ttyUSB0', 9600)
print comunica.read(16)

And then when I type in the command line:

python ler.py

I have the perfect response from the script: it shows me 2.502.502.505.00 that is the analogRead from four potentiometers in the Arduino.

The trouble starts when I try to do the same thing via browser. I did create a page named index.php and add the following code in it:

<?php
system('ls -l');
system('python ler.py');
?>

When I access the page, it return the content of the directory (ls -l) but doesn't return the values from the command "python ler.py"

In the command line works fine, but not in PHP.

I think there is something to do with the permissions, Apache runs over the www-data user and this scripts needs to access the dev ttyUSB0.

Does someone experience a similar situation?

Answer 1

Turns out the the answer is to give the correct privilege to device itself.

I set total permissions for any group/user throug the command:

sudo chmod 777 /dev/ttyUSB0

To left no doubt, I set the ler.py script executable too:

sudo chmod +x ler.py