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Asked: 2026-06-05T22:45:46+00:00

I’m working on an old php web application. The problem is the organization of

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I’m working on an old php web application.

The problem is the organization of all the files is more or less random. My favorite is at one level there is both an ‘include’ folder and an ‘includes’ folder.

The main obstacle to rearranging all the files is that most of the require and include statements are raw string file paths, and some are variables.

My current plan looks like this:

  1. Create a super_require($path) function that checks if path is where it should be, and if not, search the whole code tree for the ending filename until it’s found.

  2. Search-replace all requires and includes with super_require().

  3. Rearrange all the files to my hearts content.

  4. Wonder how it worked, since this plan seems crazy error prone.

So I guess my question is, does anyone know of a better plan in this situation?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team
    1. Rearrange the files locally on your workstation
    2. Fix all includes
    3. Test it on a staging or development server
    4. Propagate the working code to production

    The super_require idea is a slippery slope. What other language constructs and library functions will you start to wrap in magic functions? How will you maintain that in a few years time?

    Try to make the code and program structure better with each refactoring.

    PHP itself have a dark history of magic solutions. They often end up creating more problems then they solve.

    Register globals would automatically import GET and POST variables as regular variables in the global scope. This made it possible for an outsider to define variable values by just adding them to the request, creating tons of security bugs.

    But the most similar example is magic quotes which added SQL escaping to all GET and POST variables automatically, which gave developers enormous headaches as soon as they got data that was not intended for a database query. The solution for many years was to add code to reverse the magic quoting, which is much harder and easier to forget than to add it in the first place.

    The common lesson here is that the code should do exactly what you want it to do in a deterministic way, and not try to be smarter than the developer. So take your time and solve your problem The Right Way™ and avoid future trouble.

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