Absolute Path for Deployment in a Non-Root Location

Question

I typically refer to any assets on my site using absolute path so that I don't have to worry about the location of the assets relative to current file.

<!-- Using a absolute path. -->
<img src="/images/flag.png" />
<!-- Using a relative path. -->
<img src="../../../images/flag.png" />

However, this time I need to host the site at a non-root location e.g. http://my-server.com/holiday/.

How would I go about this? I am looking for a solution that doesn't require me to change the path in my files. How do I configure the server (Apache) to treat http://my-server.com/holiday/ as a "root"?

Clarification: I still need http://my-server.com/ to behave "normally". That is, it should still point to http://my-server.com/index.html i.e. doesn't get redirected to http://my-server.com/holiday/.

Answer 1

If you’re using Apache, there one rather simple thing you could do by just using an SSI variable in your paths. Do a global replace of all src="/ to something like

src="<!--#echo var="prefix" -->/

and then in your htaccess for the specific folder define the prefix variable as /holiday

For sites that don’t have the variable or SSI, it’ll just show up as a comment or you can define it as an empty string.

Of course this means you’ll have to turn on SSI in Apache.

Answer 2

try to add this to your .htaccess

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^(www.)?DOMAINNAME.com$
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/holiday/
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /holiday/$1
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^(www.)?DOMAINNAME.com$
RewriteRule ^(/)?$ holiday/index.php [L]

or take a look here - Changing the root folder via .htaccess

Answer 3

I don't think this is gonna happen for you man, sorry.

You have absolute paths in your documents, and want apache to prepend /holiday to them all without effecting the actual docroot? You can have one or the other, but not both.

You need to either do a mass edit and prepend the directory yourself, or move your images/css/etc into the actual root directory.

mod_rewrite is powerful, but can't really determine intent and parse the same url two different ways depending on what the user wants.

Edit:

I am wrong, but I don't have your answer. You may be able to use IS_SUBREQ in mod_rewrite to only apply the re-write conditions for sub-requests from your /holiday/index.php

Answer 4

Easy...

# Assuming mod_rewrite is an option...
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
   # Turn it on!
   RewriteEngine on

   # If path is /images/flag.png, connect to /holiday/images/flag.png
   RewriteBase /holiday/
</IfModule>

Assuming I'm understanding what you mean, this should do you just fine. Point of order, this .htaccess should be in /holiday/

I do this locally on MAMP for testing a website that's base is in http://localhost:8888/SocialNetwork/ ... If I didn't have that, my absolute paths of, say, /profile would go to http://localhost:8888/profile/ instead of http://localhost:8888/SocialNetwork/profile

Answer 5

what about using html's BASE element? http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/struct/links.html#h-12.4

although i´m not sure how you could have it in a single html file and inherit it to the rest of your htmls, so your source remains intact. if your site is html-only maybe with frames, otherwise you could use some sort of server-side include depending on what youre using (asp, jsp, whatever). Check out this link for more information http://www.boutell.com/newfaq/creating/include.html

Answer 6

I hate to say this but none of the above provides the solution. The answers by @Zoltan and @stslavik were close but, unfortunately, didn't work when deployed; I wished one of them worked, though.

As a result, I resorted to using a combination of named constants and include files in PHP. More details: File Structure for a PHP Project. Note that it doesn't have to be PHP; you can use other languages that provide similar features. +1 for @margusholland whose answer led me to experiment with this solution.

Answer 7

EDIT:

Of course it would work in case you do with php. Adding:

<? define(_BASE_, substr($_SERVER['SERVER_NAME'] . "/" . $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'], 0, strrpos($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'], "/" )) ); ?>

<html>

    <head>
        <script src="<?=_BASE_?>/path_relative_to_project_root"></script>
    </head>

    <body>
        <img src="<?=_BASE_?>/path_relative_to_project_root">
    </body>

</html>

Answer 8

If you have a list of filename extensions that should be redirected, you might want to use the rewrite conditions using pattern matching againt the extensions.

Another solutions is to simply create an /images directory under root and let images be downloaded from there. Or have there links to images in your path.