I am going to ask something, that I know that it has been asked already some times. But since, all of the past posts are quite old and none of them answer my problem..I try again. I am completely new in R language and relative new in php. What I want to do is to use the exec() function from php in order to execute a R script. Most of the people here will start talking about rapache, rserve and I don't know what else..but since I am not familiar with all these technologies, I prefer just using exec. The code I will show here is working just fine when I run it with Rscript from the terminal. # R script png("temp.png") plot(5,5) dev.off() But when I try to run it either with Rscript or with R CMD BATCH from PHP, like this: echo exec("Rscript my_rscript.R"); //OR //echo exec("R CMD BATCH my_rscript.R"); I get nothing back. I have checked if exec() function is available and if it works. Everything is ok with this. I read also, that I might have to change the permissions of the webserver...but I don't know how to do this in mamp. I hope I am clear with my problem and someone can help. Thanks Dimitris