PHP auto-make subdomains

[imagize]

In the near future, im going to make a free webhosting script with automated signup etc (hopefully) like freewebs, hostultra etc and my question is. Can PHP automatically create accounts for people like sub domains etc or can i just make like

mydomain.com/accountname

and then some sort of htaccess file to make

accountname.mydomain.com access mydomain.com/accountname

etc

[loadx]

checkout CPANEL it does all you say and you can write fowarding scripts to process its jobs.. basicly i think the way cpanel works is the gui dictates a bunch of cron jobs and that changes configs etc to make subdomains, ftp accounts, email addy's etc.

PLESK is also another good tool.

[imagize]

well i know hostultra does it automatically but they use perl(i think)

[Infizi]

#!/usr/local/cpanel/3rdparty/bin/php

<?php

require '/usr/local/cpanel/Cpanel/Accounting.php.inc';
$host = "localhost";
$user = "(your CPANEL login)";
$accesshash = '(generate in CPANEL)';

createacct ($host,$user,$accesshash,$usessl (1 for remote or 0 for local),$acctdomain(sub.yourdoman.com),$acctuser,$acctpass,$acctplan);

[imagize]

Thanks Infizi, but could you break this down to me a bit furthur, I've never used anything like this.

[someonewhois]

It's just using the Remote WHM (web host manager) tols that Cpanel offers.

Alternately you could edit the yourdomain.db record in the /usr/named/ (or /var/named/) file directly, adding the sub domain record.

Of course, both these methods require root access on a server - I assume it's safe to assume that?

[imagize]

yea, i have root

[someonewhois]

Then both methods will do you fine.