| Seeking help with relative and absolute paths [message #180817] |
Wed, 20 March 2013 04:45  |
The Frog
Messages: 6
Registered: March 2013
Karma:
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Junior Member |
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Hi Everyone,
Just playing with some PHP and getting my head around some of the 'gotchas' that this language and its use contain. I am hoping that there is a simple answer to this issue I am facing...so here goes:
I am designing a site (shock and horror) where I have the different elements of the site broken into different directories under the root of the site. On my development machine this is var/www/sitename as the site root. In the site root I have an index.php file that works quite happily.
I have a directory under the site root called config, and another called scripts. In the config directory I have some basic stuff like constants that I define for the site (eg/ db.php for the database constants such as username, server, etc...). Referencing this with the following php from index.php works fine:
<?PHP require_once 'config/db.php';
require_once 'config/config.php';
//do stuff here
?>
Where I am having a problem is when I try to reference the files from a script that is in the scripts directory (or any other for that matter). I have tried to set a constant in the config/config.php file that points to the root of the site with the following:
define(APP_ROOT, realpath( dirname( __FILE__ ) ).'/');
This seems to be working for this test site, but I am still concerned that this wont work anywhere but the test site. I am also concerned that there seems to be no immediately obvious way to establish this value once for the site and simply be able to reference it without having to 'require_once' it in every script that might need it (which is most of them). I have tried to set things this way so that all scripts work with the APP_ROOT constant as the basis of referencing each other in a known way (ie/ absolute paths relative to root of the site).
I feel like I am missing something glaringly obvious as this feels to me like a kludge or work-around. I am not used to coding in PHP so I thought I'd ask those who know more than I do. Can anyone clarify for me if I am on the right track or is there a simpler and more reliable (ie/ define once and its done) way of approaching this?
Many thanks in advance
The Frog
Dev Machine:
Ubuntu 10.10
Apache 2.2.14
PHP 5.3
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