Get Root Directory Path of a PHP project

Question

I have this folder structure in my PHP project. (this is as shown in eclips)

-MySystem
    +Code
    +Data_Access
    -Public_HTML
        +css
        +js
         


        

Answer 1

Summary

This example assumes you always know where the apache root folder is '/var/www/' and you are trying to find the next folder path (e.g. '/var/www/my_website_folder'). Also this works from a script or the web browser which is why there is additional code.

Code PHP7

function getHtmlRootFolder(string $root = '/var/www/') {

    // -- try to use DOCUMENT_ROOT first --
    $ret = str_replace(' ', '', $_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT']);
    $ret = rtrim($ret, '/') . '/';

    // -- if doesn't contain root path, find using this file's loc. path --
    if (!preg_match("#".$root."#", $ret)) {
      $root = rtrim($root, '/') . '/';
      $root_arr = explode("/", $root);
      $pwd_arr = explode("/", getcwd());
      $ret = $root . $pwd_arr[count($root_arr) - 1];
    }

    return (preg_match("#".$root."#", $ret)) ? rtrim($ret, '/') . '/' : null;
}

Example

echo getHtmlRootFolder();

Output:

/var/www/somedir/

Details:

Basically first tries to get DOCUMENT_ROOT if it contains '/var/www/' then use it, else get the current dir (which much exist inside the project) and gets the next path value based on count of the $root path. Note: added rtrim statements to ensure the path returns ending with a '/' in all cases . It doesn't check for it requiring to be larger than /var/www/ it can also return /var/www/ as a possible response.