Problem

Multiple development sites on a single server housed in varying subfolders off the webroot, each with it's own includes directories. When using include or require with URL file-access disabled you must supply either the complete real or relative path. Example Heirarchy:

/mainsite/
/mainsite/inc
/mainsite/website1
/mainsite/website1/inc
/mainsite/website2
/mainsite/website2/inc

Possible Solution?

I've tried half a dozen solutions to mixed success from Redirects to parsing or splitting the URI to find the document root. However, when you change the folder depth and hosts as often as I do (usually moving between servers, both apache and IIS for ease of development) it wreaks havoc upon almost every solution I've tried. The closest solution I found was:

PHP Code:

$absPATH = !isset($_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT']) ? str_replace( '\\', '/', substr($_SERVER['SCRIPT_FILENAME'],0,0-strlen($_SERVER['PHP_SELF']))).'/' : $_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'] ; 


This solution only gives me the "root" folder for the server, and fails to account for depth/heirarchy changes. So I came up with this:

PHP Code:

// ### Inverse Recursive Search for "Robots.txt"
for($relPATH = './'; !is_file($relPATH.'robots.txt'); $relPATH .= '../') {}
$absPATH = realpath($relPATH);
// ### $relPATH = Relative path to the current site's document root.
// ### $absPATH = Absolute/Real path to the current site's document root. 


Obviously you'd want to add a little extra criteria to keep this loop from running away (If you didn't have a robots.txt file for example). While this solution is reliant upon the exisitence of a robots.txt file, this is just about the only reliable cross-platform method I could think of.

Questions

Any reasons/situations why/where this wouldn't/shouldn't be used?
Is there a better way?

Thanks in advance.

Could you set a baseURL for each site/folder and append it to $absPATH you set. Not sure if that's the kind fo thing you're looking for. Might not be. You'd be setting it once in each main directories, but it doesn't seem to bad.

Essentially I am looking for a better "dynamic" PHP equivalent to baseURL.
The basic version of what I'm looking for is:

<BASE HREF="HTTP://<?= $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'] ?>/" />
<IMG SRC="somefile.jpg" />

or

PHP Code:

$absPATH = $_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT']; 
include "$absPATH/somefile.php"; 


only I want to be able to move my site between servers and (the hard part) into subfolders. The idea is to make the code more dynamic allowing me to put this site anywhere and still have it work. Something like:

// $tempROOT = Variable path to the sub-site.
<BASE HREF="HTTP://<?= $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'].$tempROOT ?>/" />
$absPATH = $_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'].$tempROOT;

<IMG SRC="somefile.jpg" />
include "$absPATH/somefile.php";

Does this make any sense or am I just dense?

I want my development sites to work given this:

http://mysite/

as well as:

http://othersite/mysite/

Not sure if this will solve every problem, but you might try the following code to get the execution path of the current file.

PHP Code:

$path = realpath( dirname( __FILE__ ) ); 


if you request a file located in /path/to/file.php $path will be set to "/path/to"

Hope that helps!