Question

I’m doing a little home computing project in PHP and am creating references like this…

<a href=\"list_beer.php?order_by=name\">Beer</a>

This seems to pick up the right file. When I do includes, I seem to need a pathname.

include_once ("/var/www/common.php");

I’m sure this can’t be right. Perhaps you could tell me what is the best practice for these things so that I can create scripts that aren’t tied to a particular pathname (or operating system, come to that) and so that the file selected in the first example is known/can be controlled? Perhaps some settings in php.ini or apache?

Thank you.

Answer 1

Actually, you need an absolute path for both.

for the web resources it should start from the web root – /

for the files you need a point where virtual path meets a filesystem one.
$_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'] is for that purpose.

so

<a href="/list_beer.php?order_by=name">Beer</a>

and

include_once ($_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT']."/common.php");

will work as desired