Question

I’m building a web app that has php files spread out through different directories, so a typical file may have several includes. All these files everywhere.

a php file may look like this:

include('../../some.php');
require('../../some.php');

and in another file you may have something like this:

 include('../../../../some.php');
require('../../../../some.php');

point being, this can get a little bit out of hand, and somewhat difficult to keep track of. Is there a way I can do this so that I don’t need to ../../.. all the time?

I tried doing this:

include('http://www.mywebsite.com/some.php');
require('http://www.mywebsite.com/some.php');

but it doesn’t seem to work, but what’s funny is that I won’t get a PHP error when I use require, only a
call to function x() error, function or object doesn't exist type error. It never said anything about the file not existing. Thank you in advance.

Answer 1

Do not trust $_SERVER variables. In some environments they can be set/altered by the user making the request. It’s much better to define the base path manually in your index/bootstrap file and use it when needed.

define('SYSTEM_PATH', __DIR__ . '/');

or on version of PHP before 5.3 you can do this

define('SYSTEM_PATH', dirname(__FILE__) . '/');

Now you can always know the path to your files.

require(SYSTEM_PATH . 'lib/class.php');

Both __DIR__ and __FILE__ are safe constants set by PHP and can be trusted.

You can autoload classes like this:

function __autoload($class_name)
{
    require SYSTEM_PATH . strtolower($class_name) . '.php';
}

In other news, I can’t ever think of a good use for include(). If you need to use include you are doing something wrong.