Question

I am supposed to store the database username and password in a .inc file outside of my html folder. my question is, how do you declare variables in .inc and how can i refer to the includes folder outside of my html folder?

Answer 1

You can define them with constants:

define("DB_USERNAME", "your-username");
define("DB_PASSWORD", "your-password");

and use them with an include in your html-folder

include "/path/to/database.inc"
mysql_connect("localhost", DB_USERNAME, DB_PASSWORD);

Please make sure the database.inc is really out of the document-root of your apache, otherwise the database password can be opened as plain/text. Consider using the *.php extension to your database.inc (=> database.php).