Question

Is there anyway to get the current URI of a file in PHP, regardless of which file it is being included?

for example:

a.php is included in b.php

But I want to get the URI of the directory in which a.php is located in.

Answer 1

Current URI can normally be composed from $_SERVER['HTTPS'], $_SERVER['SERVER_NAME'] and $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'] (except the hash identifier, #foo, which is not even sent to the server).

You can find further reference here but it’s normally easier to print_r() the $_SERVER array.

Clarification: a file can have one URL, many or none at all. There isn’t necessarily a 1 to 1 mapping between files and URLs.

---

If we have this file layout:

• /home/foo/htdocs/foo.php

    <?php
    include('./lib/utils.php');
    blah();
  

• /home/foo/htdocs/lib/utils.php

    <?php
    function blah(){
    }
  

… where /home/foo/htdocs is the document root, the way to to obtain the URL of the directory where utils.php lies is to read __FILE__ from within utils.php and replace leading $_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'] with the site’s protocol and path. E.g.:

<?php

if( isset($_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT']) ){
    $directory = realpath(dirname(__FILE__));
    $document_root = realpath($_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT']);
    $base_url = ( isset($_SERVER['HTTPS']) && $_SERVER['HTTPS']=='on' ? 'https' : 'http' ) . '://' .
        $_SERVER['SERVER_NAME'];

    if( strpos($directory, $document_root)===0 ){
        echo $base_url . str_replace(DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR, '/', substr($directory, strlen($document_root)));
    }
}

This code may need some tweaking (not all web servers create the same variables) and of course there’s no guarantee that the directory’s URL will be reachable or useful.

Nota: an earlier version of this answer mentioned $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST']. While it’s fine most of the time, it won’t include the port number when a non-default port is being used. $_SERVER['SERVER_NAME'] does.