Question

Ok, to start with – I am addicted to using a root relative link structure for everything. Include in php always makes that difficult for me, but I happened upon a line of code that lets me include root-relatively.

It’s really simple:

set_include_path( get_include_path() . PATH_SEPARATOR . $_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'] );

That’s from a comment in the php manual

I have a pretty simple php site, but with many different subdirectories, and this makes it easy to use. Also – the company may be switching servers soon, and I am thinking this may ease the transition for many sites.

So is there a security risk here? I don’t dynamically include files or remotely include them. Am I taking a performance hit including this at the top of every php file? or is it negligible?

Answer 1

There is no security risk as long as you control what you put in the include_path.

There is, however, a performance hit if you have too many paths in your include_path (as PHP will have to try each path before finding the file).