difference on production system - zend-framework

Question

I have a ZF3 project with a controller which opens excel-files and compares them with an template which will be openened, too.
On my development notebook (xampp) everything works fine, at my production system (ubuntu) the phpspreadsheet causes errors (I think it is the one).
here a snippet from my code:
$fileName="./public/files/" . $fileName; //.\ neu
echo $fileName;
$template= new Spreadsheet();
$importdcl= new Spreadsheet();
$template= \PhpOffice\PhpSpreadsheet\IOFactory::load('./public/files/Template_DCL_final.xlsx');
$importdcl= \PhpOffice\PhpSpreadsheet\IOFactory::load( $fileName);
echo "filename geladen";
I already have the folders in non relative paths because basePath() doesn't work, it won't give any result.
The echo statement is just because the server log won't give any errors. On my development system I get the echo text on my production system the error seems to be at the load statements.
First question: How could I use relative paths in here?
Second question: How can I get an idea wether is something wrong with the spreadsheet class?
This is what composer loaded:
"phpoffice/phpspreadsheet" : "dev-develop",
Is it a problem, because it has this dev version? At this point I'm quite confused because I played with the pathes of the files, I changed the rights manually in the folder, I checked server logs and now I don't have any idea left.
Here the rights in the folder:
Any helpful suggestions appreciated.

Answer 1

Answer (hopefully) to the first question: if your application is based on ZendSkeletonApplication, then you can use paths relative to your application root (from index.php):
/**
* This makes our life easier when dealing with paths. Everything is relative
* to the application root now.
*/
chdir(dirname(__DIR__));
So if your data files are located in <application root>/public/files, then you should be able to read them from controller/service/etc. using public/files/<file name> path. You can test it with eg. the file_exists function.
I’m unable to answer your second question, but here are some suggestions (OK, questions…):
what is the status code of your (production) server’s response?
Do you have read/write permissions to the data files from the server’s account (www-data?)?
Does phpspreadsheet depend on any PHP extensions? Do you have them installed on both your development machine and the server?
What PHP version is installed on the server? Do you or phpspreadsheet use any features that may be unavailable on that version?
Try running your project not through Apache, but with PHP’s builtin server (but don’t do it long-term) and try to reproduce the issue.