This script is to be used to display the number of currently playing players for your bukkit minecraft server.
Webserver (Apache, lighttpd, nginx-fpm)
PHP 5.3+
Minecraft 1.2.5+ running Bukkit
Vitals Bukkit plugin: http://goo.gl/Id0Dm
Once the Vitals plugin is installed and running, you need to enable the "Users Online Flatfile" module.
/vtoggle onlineplayersflatfile
followed by
/vreload
The last thing you have to do is to soft link the usersonline.txt in your minecraft directory to a permissible directory.
Example
My Minecraft Root Folder: /root/mc/plugins/Vitals/onlineplayers.txt
For security reasons my user account does not have permission to the /root folder so I made a softlink
sudo ln -s /www/uonline.txt /root/mc/plugins/Vitals/onlineplayers.txt
Assuming you have the Minecraft permissions, and you've setup $file within the php script you should be all set.