You're looking for the exec function.
Be aware of a few dangers with this function, namely:
When allowing user-supplied data to be passed to this function, use escapeshellarg() or escapeshellcmd() to ensure that users cannot trick the system into executing arbitrary commands.
Note: If a program is started with this function, in order for it to
continue running in the background, the output of the program must be
redirected to a file or another output stream. Failing to do so will
cause PHP to hang until the execution of the program ends.
Reading Output
The exec command has an optional variable called $output which can be used to display the output of the command run via PHP. However, this only works after the sub-process (in this case the batch file) exits, which does not work for a Server script.
To display information while the script is still running we must redirect the output of the script to a file and then read that file. To demonstrate this, we'll take our example:
exec("server.bat");
and add a redirect to "server_log.txt"
exec("server.bat > server_log.txt");
Once this is running we can check the output of the batch file by reading "server_log.txt"
A good (if somewhat dated) tutorial on reading files from PHP can be found here.
