PHP shared includes on MAMP development environment

PHP
1

Hi

I’m assigning $_SERVER[‘DOCUMENT_ROOT’] to a variable so that I can use includes from all over a website’s directory structure regardless of where I place the script. Problem is, I’m using MAMP on a Mac and instead of

$_SERVER[‘DOCUMENT_ROOT’]

giving me

http://localhost:8888/

it is giving me

/Applications/MAMP/htdocs

When the variable is assigned the above value, it doesn’t ‘invoke’ (for my lack of a better technical term) the localhost and the php doesn’t work.

Also, I intend this line of php code (which assigns the absolute path to the variable) to be in my head.php file, which is included at the top of all the pages. I do this so that I don’t have to add this line into every file. BUT if I’m in a different directory to head.php, how will it know how to find the include?

Should I use a global variable? Or a constant? But then do I have to use sessions? Please help. So appreciated.

Nick

2

Should be in a file that is located in the root, then included from there.


<?php

$rootUri = str_replace( $_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'], '/', dirname( __FILE__ ) );
  $rootUri = preg_replace( '~[/\\\\\\\\]+~', '/', "/$rootUri/" ); # Clean up

echo '<a href="', $rootUri, 'page.html">page</a>';
3

Hi everyone thanks for the great replies. After researching and trying more, I realized that php5 protects against ‘cross site attacks’ by not allowing includes of files with absolute URLS in them. Fair enough. I was considering turning that off on my localhost just to continue with development, but then i realized it might not work when I make it live on my public host, so I don’t wanna risk that.

This is my problem: menu.php contains the HTML that forms my navigation menu that appears throughout the site at the top of every page. So to avoid putting it in every file, I use include “menu.php”; on all the pages. Pretty elementary technique, so that I don’t have to make changes to every page (there are possibly hundreds) when I need to change it.

Problem is, if I’m viewing an HTML file in a sub-directory i.e. rootdirectory/associates/associate1.html then the relative URLS in the links in my menu.php include file don’t work i.e. <a href=“index.php” > because I’m in a sub-directory.

So I thought to use absolute URL’s, but then I’m going to have to change them all once I move it from my localhost to my live host. So I decided to assign a variable at the top of that menu.php include file and then put that variable in the links i.e.

<?php $rootdir = ‘http://localhost:8888/rootdirectory/’; ?>

and then

<a href=“<?php echo $rootdir; ?>index.php”>Home</a>

and so on for every link.

But it says that’s not allowed because you can’t include a file with absolute URLs because that’s a security risk.

So I tried DOCUMENT_ROOT:

I tested it by <?php echo $rootdir; ?> and it works; it echoes the document root. But the document root i.e. applications/MAMP/rootdirectory/ isn’t going to work because I need it to say http://localhost:8888/rootdirectory/ instead.

I tried SERVER_NAME but using SERVER_NAME in an include doesn’t work either because it returns localhost/ instead of localhost:8888/ which is basically useless.

So I don’t know what to do. Does this make it clear? Thanks everyone.

4

If he wants to redirect to a certain page, he’ll want to use HTTP_HOST or SERVER_NAME
If he wants to include from his MAMP folder structure, he’ll want to use DOCUMENT_ROOT

I think that what we need now is, some example code that shows us how he’s intending to use them.

5

You are going about it the wrong way…you do not include using HTTP URLs!

6

Run php_info()

You will see a report of server information, including globals in your apache environment. You should see that ones such as HTTP_HOST and SERVER_NAME have no slash following them.

7

DOCUMENT_ROOT gives you the local root path.

SERVER_NAME should be the remote root path that you’re after.

8

Thanks so much for the reply. I definitely learned something there. It doesn’t solve the problem though, because in the URL bar I have to enter

http://localhost:8888/

and not

localhost/ (because SERVER_NAME returns localhost/ )

so assigning SERVER_NAME won’t work. I was thinking about just concatenating http:// and :8888/ to either end of it but there’s that pesky / at the end of localhost/

how do I solve this?

Thanks for your help.

Nick