Question

My site is almost up and running, but in the original code there are, for example img src="/design/pic1.png" and so one. On the real server, there is a must dir, web, so the new paths should be img src="web/design/pic1.png" but I don’t want to rewrite all paths.
Is there another option?

Answer 1

Depending on your set up, one approach would be to have a constant that dictates your base path which is dependant on your environment.

For example, suppose in your development environment you’re happy to put all images in $WEB_ROOT . "/design/", but on your production environment it’s $WEB_ROOT . "/web/design/", then you might end up with something like this:

<?php

    // initialise stuff for development
    if(ENVIRONMENT == ENV_DEV) {

        define("BASE_PATH", "/");

    // initialise stuff for production 
    } elseif(ENVIRONMENT == ENV_PROD) {

        define("BASE_PATH", "/web");

    }

?>

Then, in your HTML, you could use this BASE_PATH constant like so:

<img src="<?=BASE_PATH;?>/design/pic1.png" />

How you decide what is ENV_DEV and ENV_PROD in this example, is entirely up to you.

One approach would be to detect it based on the domain (using $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'], which has some caveats).

Another approach would be to initialise this in your web configuration. Suppose you’re using Apache2, you might use the SetEnv directive.

In your httpd.conf:

SetEnv MY_ENVIRONMENT DEV

Which you can access in PHP using:

<?php

    $_SERVER['MY_ENVIRONMENT'];

    // or...

    getenv("MY_ENVIRONMENT");

?>