Question

I’m building the basic framework for my website and I have a config.php file stored in a scr directory. Additionally, this directory has a folder called php where I store a file called sidebar.php

Basically, the config.php file will hold my database configuration variables and is also the only file called by every page. I wish to include php/sidebar.php in this file so any variables I create in sidebar.php can be used on all pages.

However, I also want sidebar.php to have access to the database configuration variables. So these two files will effectively be including each other.

The include from config to sidebar is:

include 'php/sidebar.php';

From sidebar to config is:

include '../config.php';

However, the above statement (sidebar to config) yields the below error message:

Warning: include(../config.php)
[function.include]: failed to open
stream:

No such file or directory in
C:\xampp\website\scr\php\sidebar.php
on line 3

Am I going about this all wrong cross-linking the two files or is there a decent reason why it’s not working

Answer 1

I guess that the php parser is already reading the file. You should use include_once instead of include to avoid this problem.

Aditionally you should also strongly consider require_once as it protect against the case where the included file doesn’t exists, especially for a configuration file, your app should crash instead of ignoring it (And that’s what require does).

PS : As other said the cyclic dependency should be broken anyway it’s a pretty good sign of bad design.