I'm building a local web application for my company, and I`m trying to run it in an xampp webserver. My problem is that I want to setup my root folder one time, and reference it in all my files.
For example, my folder structure is as follows:
root/index.php
root/include/includefiles.php
root/reles/ajustes/ajustes.php
root/classes/html/menu.php
root/classes/html/rodape.php
root/img/head.png
All of my files have to include the files menu.php and rodape.php
Using relative paths I would do "include ../../classes/html/menu.php" and "../classes/html/menu.php"
Until there it's ok, but in my menu.php file I have a link to other files, and I cannot utilize relative paths to link to it, because at index.php the link would be "/img/head.png" and at ajustes.php would be "../../img/head.png"
My solution is to define a root path, and I would link all my relative paths to ROOT_PATH."/img/head.png".
I found some solutions for this which worked. My problem appears when I try to access my application externally, from another computer using my host IP address, I can access my website, but the link appears as "c:/xampp/htdocs...", and I don't want that, I want the links appearing as "http://host-ip/img/head.png".
A good practice in defining the include paths is to add the __DIR__ magic constant before the include path. That way the path is always defined relative to the directory of the current file instead of the working directory.
You should have a different root path for public urls and internal server paths. So I'd recommend using the __DIR__ for includes and other internal server paths and another constant to be used in html and other public paths.
Edit: To clarify: the internal server path is the actual path on the server (www_root/foo/bar) and the public path is the one the server software serves through http (http://example.com/foo/bar)
Related
I have my website on my local server (localhost - XAMPP). My website is broken up into three parts: 1)Header 2)Body and 3)Footer/Jscripts.
The header.php calls other basic files for the header section of the webpage. It works fine when I used relative paths, for example: include_once('./_css/main.css'); to call my CSS files or include_once('./_inc/metadata.php); to call my metadata for my pages.
The problem arises when I use an absolute path:
include_once('http://localhost/mywebsite.com/_css/main.css'); the same for the other files.
Why is that? This all started because I want to create subfolders because I had a general page, but now that I'm breaking it down to subpages I need a folder to contain the subpages
I was trying to include the css files and all the other resource files to the subpages, but they break using the relative paths method (./_css/main.css) being pulled from the header file located in the root directory. On the subpages, I'm using include_once('../_inc/header.php') to include the initial header.php file.
I want to avoid having to duplicate all the resource files from the root directory and adding them in the subfolder with their respective relative paths. That's why I was trying to use the absolute path method.
Any insight or clue would be appreciate as to:
Fix the 'Warning: include_once(): http:// wrapper is disabled in the server configuration by allow_url_include=0' error when using the absolute path.
2)Sharing css files in subfolders.
Using an absolute path may be a bad idea, what if you move from localhost to a real server? You'd need to make massive changes. Changing the project structure so that you could avoid all of this might be better, or if you really want to keep things as they are, use a variable.
<?php
$include_path = "whatever/path"
include('../header.php');
?>
and in header.php
<?php
include($include_path.'/my_css.css');
?>
I have a PHP page on my site in a sub folder called Articles.
The page is article.php.
The article.php page requires a common php page called _head.php. This provides the header for the pages.
_head.php is located in the root directory.
The /Articles directory is a subdirectory within the root.
I've included this _head.php page in article.php this way:
<?php include("../_head.php"); ?>
And this works fine.
The problem, however, is that the image elements within _head.php are located in the 'images' subdirectory (also off the root) and are referenced relative to the _head.php being in the root, like this...
<img src="images/services.gif">
So if I use _head.php for files on the root, it works great and shows all the images correctly. But when I include _head.php into a php file that is not in the root, but instead in a subdirectory like /Articles (/Articles/articles.php), the images do not show up.
Do I need to change the _head.php file in how it references the images or is there some code I'm supposed to include in articles.php when including _head.php that tells it how to use _head.php?
I'm concerned about using all absolute paths because if I have to move this site to another server this is going to cause me issues.
Mentioning what I follow not going to the hierarchical complexity,
For any PHP file that is being imported into another PHP file in root simple include/require_once (<path>).
For any file below root accessing other file anywhere within the root I use include/require_once (../<path>).
For accessing files which are outside the root, I use the absolute path of that file.
Working on few php files what I have seen using absolute path is the best thing in two ways, a) you are free from remembering the paths of different files and b) if you are using CDN or if your files are on different servers then this is very helpful. Anyways opinions may vary, this is my personal view/choice.
I'm using Laravel 4.1. I put phpgrid into the vendors directory. Here are my paths using example domains:
Actual file path to website root: /home/.../htdocs/dashboard/public
Actual file path to phpgrid: /home/.../htdocs/dashboard/vendor/phpgrid
The (example) url to the site is: http://www.site1.com/dashboard/
The SERVER_ROOT is set to: http://www.site1.com/dashboard/vendor/phpgrid
phpgrid works when I use that domain. The problem is that I want to use a shorter domain with masking. So the url I want to use is something like: http://dashboard.myotherdomain.com/, and the virtual host has it pointing to the actual file path to the website root directory above. phpgrid builds the table, but then the AJAX fires and can't get to the vendor directory because it is now below the site root of the masked domain. I thought it would use the absolute path, but it doesn't seem to. Any ideas?
It turns out that the issue was with the AJAX calls. AJAX will not let you call a different domain for security reasons, so setting the SERVER_ROOT to a different domain than my masked domain was failing (silently btw, blank error message in phpgrid). So I was forced to move the phpgrid files and folders into the webroot and change the SERVER_ROOT to a relative path.
A simple fix although I would have preferred to keep the files in the vendor directory.
Consider the following scenario: I have a vhost defined to some paths on my home folder.
say ~/web/project-name/ is my root. such that when i point to http://some-name/ it points to the index.php inside ~/web/project-name.
I've a Model-View-Controller framework (self-made/minimal) and my views contains different client side links (js, or css, or a href) Since I made my working folder root, i used absoulte path names (for instance /client/css/my.css ).
Now a friends comes in takes my projects. Copies it to /var/www/ So, now the contents of my website is not root, so my links in the views does not work?
What is the best way to mitigate the above problem?
I tried defining a constant ROOT as define('ROOT', dirname(__FILE__)) in my index.php, but it returns the absolute path like /home/cipher/...
I want to make a function such that it returns the path of my index.php relative to the web root!
Thanks in advance!
You might want to try a $_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'].
Is this, for example, a good idea?
require_once($_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'].'/include.php');
If you have two virtual hosts on the same server, one for live and one for development, with different Apache DocumentRoots, this would avoid having to include absolute paths when the source of the include is unknown, and may be in any directory.
(Note: file paths in the following section are relative to the web root. They would in fact be like /var/www/app/core/init.php, where /var/www/app is the web root)
For instance: I have an /core/init.php which is called using relative paths from places all over the website (/file.php, /dir/file.php or /dir/dir/file.php).
This init.php then includes several function pages, in the fund directory, a subdir of /core (as in /core/func/userfunctions.php).
So, in init.php, I can use the $_SERVER method, because it breaks if I use a relative path and try to call functions from a page like /dir/file.php.
I can't see any problem with it, but in general what could go wrong?
I've seen cases where $_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'] is not set or is not what you would expect (i.e. not set in CLI or old IIS, or invalid in certain CGI setups).
For that reason you can use dirname(__FILE__) to obtain the path of the script that line is called in. You can then reference relative paths from there e.g.
include dirname(__FILE__) . '/../../other/file.php';
I go with the above method when the directory structure of the files is known and is not subject to change.
If DOCUMENT_ROOT is not available, the following is a suitable replacement:
substr($_SERVER['SCRIPT_FILENAME'], 0, -strlen($_SERVER['SCRIPT_NAME']));
You don't need to do this. PHP looks for the included file in the document root by default.
You can use set_include_path($new_include_path) to change this behaviour, or edit include_path in the php config file.
Also, from http://php.net/manual/en/reserved.variables.server.php:
'DOCUMENT_ROOT'
The document root directory under which the current script is executing, as defined in the server's configuration file.
For example, if you use URL rewriting, you will be very happy when you find out that the includes in your /there/are/so/many/paths/in/the/url/of/this/ page are still working!