[development] Curl-based content generation

[M. Fioretti]

On Thu, Feb 05, 2009 13:50:46 PM -0500, Earl Dunovant wrote:
> Use drupal_execute().
> 
> http://api.drupal.org/api/function/drupal_execute/6

I don't know about Martin, but as far as I'm concerned, this goes hand
in hand with Jimmy's suggestion to use the SimpleTest browser. Both
are elegant solutions but require shell access to the server and/or
changes/additions to the Drupal installation and/or a working PHP
command line interpreter to do things remotely: all things much harder
to have or set up than a bash/curl script running from home or even
the barest Live Linux distro on a USB key

The only problem is that to write such a script one needs to know in
advance:

- the exact sequence of URLs to call (isn't this documented anywhere
  but in the source code itself?)
- a list of the names and admissible values of all the form variables
  to pass to curl when it calls each one of those URLs. (**)

With all respect, can it really be that getting/providing just this
information is such a complex task that it's simpler to learn the
drupal API or set up a full Drupal testing environment?

Thanks in advance for any pointer to a shell+curl-only solution to this
problem.

	Marco

(**) as I already said previously, I'd have no problem to extract
those lists myself with a mysql query to the database, if only I knew
what query(es) to make to get all and only that information. Is this
documented somewhere?

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