PHP include seems to make page interpret itself as a directory - php

I have a page, index.php, like this (simplified):
<img src="content/banner.png"/>
The image loads fine. But when I include a certain (WordPress) script, like so,
<img src="content/banner.png"/>
<?php
include('template-loader.php');
?>
the image no longer loads! I also notice the URL in the browser becomes index.php/.
How is this possible? The image of course won't load because I'm using relative paths and it's looking for index.php/content/banner.jpg. True, I can use absolute paths to fix this issue, but I'd like to know what could be happening and how the problem might be fixed in PHP.
I'm testing on a local wamp installation and have disabled all mod_rewrites and such, to be sure it's not something external causing the problem.

D'oh. Minutes after posting, I found the culprit, right in the script:
/**
* Loads the correct template based on the visitor's url
* #package WordPress
*/
if ( defined('WP_USE_THEMES') && WP_USE_THEMES )
do_action('template_redirect');
It's doing some kind of a redirect; commenting this out makes everything work as expected.
I still don't really understand how this script can magically redirect to index.php/ as if it were a directory (and have the document actually load) but...
I will delete this question in the future if it doesn't seem to be helping anyone (based on views and votes).

Related

What is the function of using php for site links?

I am working on a site and the builders have used a mix of php and html for links. For example:
<li>Variable Speed Drives</li>
<li>Corrosion Resistant Baseplates</li>
and
<li>MP Repair</li>
<li>MTA Repair</li>
The php is referenced in another file in this way:
<?php
$pdf_link = "../pdf/";
$external_pdf_link = "../../pdf/";
$video_link = "../video/";
$external_video_link = "../../video/";
?>
My concern is not knowing the function of the php, other than it being a placeholder, and given that the links work both ways, I don't want to break something because I am clueless to its purpose.
In doing my due diligence researching, I ran across this post, which is close, but still no cigar, Add php variable inside echo statement as href link address?. All of the research seems to be about how rather than why. This is the site, and they only used it for the "Downloads" links: http://magnatexpumps.com/
Thank you...
B
There is no right way. They are just different.
Let's forget the PHP for a while. If you have this link in a page:
<a href='about.html'/>About</a>
What will happen? The browser will change the URL of the document. If you are at the root of the site like: "www.example.com", will redirect to "www.example.com/about.html". If you are in a URL like "www.example.com/news/index.html" will redirect you to "www.example.com/new/about". That's why sometimes it is useful to have a variable before, to force a full path URL.
Another case of URL variable interpolation is when you have different systems running in the same url. In this case, you will have to append the system name in order to get to where you want. If you don't know where your application will run if it will run on the doc root, or in a subfolder, use a variable to indicate the base path.

Directory path calls, strange behaviour

I have an ajax request that I'm trying to call a specific file from which is located at:
ROOT/admin/functions/upload/filename.php
And the page making the request from is located at:
ROOT/admin/customers/123
Which is modified through htaccess from
ROOT/admin/customer.php?id=123
I have tried every combination of paths I could think of but I get some strange behaviours for example when I use
../functions/upload/filename.php
It looks for the file in
ROOT/functions/uploads/filename.php
And when I use
functions/upload/filename.php
It looks for the file in
ROOT/admin/customers/functions/uploads/filename.php
So I tried
../admin/functions/upload/filename.php
And it looks in
ROOT/admin/admin/functions/upload/filename.php
I'm pulling my hair out here, has anyone got any ideas as to what this might be?
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks, James.
Since the browser knows NOTHING about your server-side paths, and it only has the path you see in the address bar, e.g.
http://example.com/ROOT/admin/customers/123
then if your ajax code looks like
$.ajax('functions/foo/bar.php');
Then the ajax call will be requesting
http://example.com/ROOT/admin/customers/123/functions/foo/bar.php
Similarly, adding ../ just strips off levels of the source page's address:
$.ajax('../../functions/foo/bar.php');
results in
http://example.com/ROOT/admin/customers/123/../../functions/foo/bar.php
^-A-^
^-------B------^
http://example.com/ROOT/admin/functions/foo.bar.php
You probably want
$.ajax('/ROOT/functions/foo/bar.php');
With that leading /, the browser ignores ALL of the subdirectory stuff in the url and uses the entire path from the ajax call as the entirety of the path.
http://example.com/ + /ROOT/functions/foo.bar.php

Constant set using define() not working in included PHP file

I have this code inside of my header
<?php
define('RELPATH','http://www.saint57records.com/');
include_once(RELPATH.'sidebar.php');
?>
and an example line of code in the sidebar
<img style="margin:10px;" src="<?php print RELPATH;?>images/logo.png" width="60px"/>
but when it gets to the page it includes the file correctly but all the links inside of the file just print RELPATH instead of the web url like this
<img style="margin:10px;" src="RELPATHimages/logo.png" width="60px"/>
It works fine on the other pages of my website, just not inside of Wordpress. Does anyone know what might be causing this issue?
The short answer is to provide a filesystem path to RELPATH, not a web URL.
The long answer is that when you use a web URL to include a PHP file, the PHP file will be treated like an external source. It will be called remotely, executed in a process of its own, and return the results. A constant defined previously can not have an effect in this remote resource.
If http://www.saint57records.com/ is on a different server, you'll have to pass RELPATH to it some other way, e.g. through a GET variable (which you'd have to sanitize with htmlentities() prior to use.) However, including content from a remote server in this way isn't good practice. It'll slow down your page as it'll make an expensive web request. If the target server is down, your page will time out.

Get Page URL In Order To Use It To Include

So I made a script so that I can just use includes to get my header, pages, and then footer. And if a file doesnt exist a 404. That all works. Now my issue is how I'm supposed to get the end of the url being the page. For example,
I want to make it so that when someone goes to example.com/home/test, it will automatically just include test.php for example.
Moral of the story. How to some how get the page name. And then use it to "mask" the end of the page so that I don't need to have every URL being something.com/home/?p=home
Heres my code so far.
<?php
include($_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'].'/home/lib/php/_dc.php');
include($_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'].'/home/lib/php/_home_fns.php');
$script = $_SERVER['SCRIPT_NAME']; //This returns /home/index.php for example =/
error_reporting(E_ALL);
include($_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'].'/home/default/header.php');
if($_GET["p"] == 'home' || !isset($_GET["p"])) {
include($_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'].'/home/pages/home.php');
} else if(file_exists($_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'].'/home/pages/'.$_GET["p"].'.php')) {
include($_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'].'/home/pages/'.$_GET["p"].'.php');
} else {
include($_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'].'/home/default/404.php');
}
include($_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'].'/home/default/footer.php');
?>
PHP by itself wouldn't be the best choice here unless you want your website littered with empty "redirect" PHP files. I would recommend looking into the Apache server's mod_rewrite module. Here are a couple of guides to get you started. Hope this helps!
The simplest way would be to have an index.php file inside the /home/whatever folder. Then use something like $_SERVER['PHP_SELF'] and extract the name if you want to automate it, or since you are already writing the file yourself, hardcode it into it.
That however looks plain wrong, you should probably look into mod-rewrite if you are up to creating a more complex/serious app.
I would also recommend cakePHP framework that has the whole path-to-controller thing worked out.

How to detect the path to the application root?

I'm trying to dynamically detect the root directory of my page in order to direct to a specific script.
echo ($_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT']);
It prints /myName/folder/index.php
I'd like to use in a html-file to enter a certain script like this:
log out
This seems to be in bad syntax, the path is not successfully resolved.
What's the proper approach to detect the path to logout.php?
The same question in different words:
How can I reliably achieve the path to the root directory (which contains my index.php) from ANY subdirectory? No matter if the html file is in /lib/subfolder or in /anotherDirectory, I want it to have a link directing to /lib/logout.php
On my machine it's supposed to be http://localhost/myName/folder (which contains index.php and all subdirectories), on someone else's it might be http://localhost/project
How can I detect the path to application root?
After some clarification from the OP it become possible to answer this question.
If you have some configuration file being included in all php scripts, placed in the app's root folder you can use this file to determine your application root:
$approot = substr(dirname(__FILE__),strlen($_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT']));
__FILE__ constant will give you filesystem path to this file. If you subtract DOCUMENT_ROOT from it, the rest will be what you're looking for. So it can be used in your templates:
log out
Probably you are looking for the URL not the Path
log out
and you are not echoing the variable in your example.
Your DOCUMENT_ROOT is local to your machine - so it might end up being c:/www or something, useful for statements like REQUIRE or INCLUDE but not useful for links.
If you've got a page accessible on the web - linking back to a document on C: is going to try and get that drive from the local machine.
So for links, you should just be able to go /lib/logout.php with the initial slash taking you right to the top of your web accessible structure.
Your page, locally - might be in c:/www/myprojects/project1/lib/logout.php but the site itself might be at http://www.mydomain.com/lib/project.php
Frameworks like Symfony offer a sophisticated routing mechanism which allows you to write link urls like this:
log out
It has tons of possibilities, which are described in the tutorial.
Try this,
log out
This jumps to the root directly.
DOCUMENT_ROOT refers to the physical path on the webserver. There is no generic way to detect the http path fragment. Quite often you can however use PHP_SELF or REQUEST_URI
Both depend on how the current script was invoked. If the current request was to the index.php in a /whatever/ directory, then try the raw REQUEST_URI string. Otherwise it's quite commonly:
<?= dirname($_SERVER["SCRIPT_NAME"]) . "/lib/logout.php" ?>
It's often best if you use a configurable constant for such purposes however. There are too many ifs going on here.
I'm trying to figure this out for PHP as well. In asp.net, we have Request.ApplicationPath, which makes this pretty easy.
For anyone out there fluent in PHP who is trying to help, this code does what the OP is asking, but in asp.net:
public string AppUrl
{
get
{
string appUrl = Request.Url.GetLeftPart(UriPartial.Authority) + Request.ApplicationPath;
if (appUrl.Substring(appUrl.Length - 1) != "/")
{
appUrl += "/";
}
// Workaround for sockets issue when using VS Built-int web server
appUrl = appUrl.Replace("0.0.0.0", "localhost");
return appUrl;
}
}
I couldn't figure out how to do this in PHP, so what I did was create a file called globals.php, which I stuck in the root. It has this line:
$appPath = "http://localhost/MyApplication/";
It is part of the project, but excluded from source control. So various devs just set it to whatever they want and we make sure to never deploy it. This is probably the effort the OP is trying to skip (as I skipped with my asp.net code).
I hope this helps lead to an answer, or provides a work-around for PHPers out there.

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