Question

Should ZF and PHP have the same path to include in php.ini, or can they be put in separate directories? This is the include path in my php.ini:

;Windows: "\path1;\path2"
include_path = ".;C:\xampp\php\PEAR;C:\ZF\library\"

I couldn’t find any Zend documents that specify which, copying ZF\library to xampp\php\PEAR or the entire ZF directory, or using multiple include paths, is recommended for MVC app production. Is there a good practice or does it depend more on not having access to a certain part of a server or if you are using shared hosting, combining PHP and ZF would be the better option?

Answer 1

Should ZF and PHP have the same path to include in php.ini, or can
they be put in separate directories?

It is fine to have multiple directories listed in your php.ini.

include_path = “.;C:\xampp\php\PEAR;C:\ZF\library\”

The following would be better:

include_path = "C:\xampp\php\PEAR;C:\ZF\library\"

In other words, you don’t need the “.” in your path since anything that needs to be included in the current working directory can be included like this “./path/to/file.php”.

Furthermore, you will want to use an autoloader but having the autoloader search “.”, is more work than is needed.

Finally, I generally have an include path of:

include_path = "C:\xampp\php\PEAR"

The reason is that since PHPUnit is generally installed via the PEAR installer, I always want that globally available; however, for everything else, I can wait until I have access to a PSR-0 compliant autoloader.

Hope that helps.