Including files using relative paths with PHP?

Question

When developing my website I called all the includes in my php files by calling one single file called includes.

The code of this file looked somethig like this: (I

Answer 1

First off: I'd drop the DS, it's BS (ehe). Windows support both C:/wamp/www and C:\wamp\www :-) Even C:\wamp\www/project is fine.

If includes.php is located in, say lib/includes.php (relative to your project root), then do this:

define('SITE_ROOT', realpath('../'));

That will dynamically set SITE_ROOT.

Answer 2

Two suggestions here:

1. You're going to want SITE_ROOT to be absolute path of the directory your files are located in. For example, in the above code, this directory is C:\wamp\www\ArmyCreator. You can define this manually if you know the directory, or dynamically by using the predefined __DIR__ constant (PHP 5.3+), or dirname(__FILE__) if you're not on 5.3 yet.

2. Including a bunch of files all at once in generally considered bad practice, and autoloading should be used instead. This will give you better performance as well as a well-defined directory layout and naming scheme, leading to better code. To do this, you can use the spl_autoload_register() function.

Answer 3

First off, don't abuse ternary syntax like that. Instead of defined('DS') ? null : define('DS', DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR);, you can use the OR operator (which will short-circuit on a boolean true result):

defined('DS') OR define('DS', DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR);

Secondly, if this is inside of a bootstrap file that you know the position of, simply use dirname(__FILE__):

defined('SITE_ROOT') OR define('SITE_ROOT', dirname(__FILE__));

Otherwise, if you know the relative position of the root, you can use multiple dirname calls. So if it's the parent directory of the present one:

defined('SITE_ROOT') OR define('SITE_ROOT', dirname(dirname(__FILE__)));

Don't use $_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'] or cwd() or hardcode your path. Always use dirname(__FILE__) to determine the absolute path. For more info on why, see This Answer

Answer 4

You can include the files relative to includes.php's directory by doing:

<?
$basePath = dirname(__FILE__);
require_once($basePath . "relative/path/from/basePath"); // replace the string with your real relative path