Setting Root

[Drongo_III]

Hello

 

Hope someone can help and I'm sure this is a simple one.

 

 I'm using a local copy of XAMPP at the moment and have a basic issue but I've been searching around and struggling to find the answer.

 

Usually when I work on a site, lets say it's domain is example.com, and I wish to include a file from a location like example.com/includes/, I would simply use a php's include as follows:

<?php

include('/includes/some-file.php');

?>

In this instance I'd expect the '/' to refer to the base domain - i.e. example.com - so that irrespective of where I include the file from it always has a sound reference.

 

However, on my local xampp i'm having issues.

 

So lets say I have a file I want to include located in in:  /htdocts/ng/includes/some-file.php

 

And I try to include it from a sub directory /htdocs/ng/some-dir/ as per the code posted above I get an error:

 

"No such file or directory in C:\xampp\htdocs\ng\some-dir\some-file.php"

 

It's as if the include path is always trying to include from the current directory.  So is there a setting in apache I need to change to ensure that the base domain is always referenced?

 

Hope that makes sense,

 

Drongo

[benanamen]

If I understand your example it would be

 

include('../includes/some-file.php');

 

for a file located here: /htdocs/ng/some-dir/

 

to include a file located here: /htdocts/ng/includes/some-file.php  

[Drongo_III]

Yeah I could use a relative path but on other servers I've worked on they've set them up so you just use /includes/file-name.php and it doesnt matter where you then make the call from it still works.  I guess I was just trying to work out how to configure xampp so it always looks at /htdocs/ as it's root when including files?  

[Jacques1]

Using absolute paths and then expecting them to somehow be turned into relative paths is a really, really bad idea.

 

The path

/includes/file-name.php

is absolute and literally means: “Right below the root filesystem, there's an includes directory with the script file-name.php”.

 

This obviously makes no sense. Maybe your Windows PC interprets the path differently, but all Unix-based servers will see an absolute path.

 

If you want a path to be relative to some base directory, then you actually need a relative path. Use the include_path directive to set the base directory:

// assuming C:/htdocs/ng is in your include_path
include 'includes/some-file.php';

[Drongo_III]

Thanks for the advice!

[scootstah]

In this instance I'd expect the '/' to refer to the base domain - i.e. example.com - so that irrespective of where I include the file from it always has a sound reference.

You're confusing the way HTML works with how filesystems work. The filesystem has no idea what "example.com" is. Filesystem directories are not based on domain names. On UNIX-based systems the filesystem is a tree structure, and begins with a "/". The "/" is referred to as "root".

 

By using a "/" at the beginning of a path name, you are starting from the root of the filesystem. That is an absolute path. If you want to start from any other directory you would use a relative path, by omitting the "/" from the beginning.

 

Since you're on Windows, a "/" means the root of the partition that the script was executed from. So if your PHP file is located in C:\, then "/" would refer to C:\. If your script is located in F:\, then "/" would refer to F:\.

 

Yeah I could use a relative path but on other servers I've worked on they've set them up so you just use /includes/file-name.php and it doesnt matter where you then make the call from it still works.

You must be mistaken, because that's simply not how it works.

[mac_gyver]

if your server is set up correctly, and if it's not, you can fix to be so, $_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'] refers to the document root folder and can be used for building an absolute file system path for include/require statements.