Absolute path issues in PHP on localhost in OS X

Question

I'm having some issues with defined absolute paths in PHP. I define the SITE_ROOT and APP_PATH like so:

defined('SITE_ROOT') ? null : define('SITE_ROOT', str_replace('//','/',dirname(__FILE__)) ); defined('APP_PATH') ? null : define('APP_PATH', SITE_ROOT.DS.'application');

When using the APP_PATH in an application like so:

echo APP_PATH;

...this is what I get:

/Users/user/Sites/MyWebsite/application

What I want is for the output to be:

localhost/application

Is there any non-kludgy way of doing this?

My use case is to use the APP_PATH (already in use for doing all my require()'s) echoed out with HTML to avoid relative pathing problems within URLs for href's.

deceze · Accepted Answer · 2010-10-06 06:27:30Z

1

The __FILE__ constant contains the file path, nothing else. Look at $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'] and $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'] to find out what URL was used to invoke the script. This is environment information that must be supplied by the web server that initiated the PHP script (e.g. Apache), it's not something PHP inherently knows.

answered Oct 6, 2010 at 6:27

deceze♦

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4 Comments

Josh Smith Over a year ago

Great, thanks! Since my plan is to have this code easily portable from my local dev env to my prod env, would you recommend establishing two separate paths? One would use $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'] and the other mentioned above. Or are there any problems with this approach? And are there any potential gotchas if you're deployed across multiple servers?

deceze Over a year ago

@Josh First of all, you shouldn't include the host in your links, but use absolute paths without host (i.e. /application/page/foo). This solves relative URL problems without overcomplicating things. Secondly, it really depends on your app how to do this elegantly. If you're using a Dispatcher model (one specific .php file is always invoked, which dispatches the request to other files) it's relatively simple to figure out "where you are", so you don't have to do any system specific configuration. Have a look at any of the popular PHP frameworks for examples.

Josh Smith Over a year ago

I have an initialize.php file that does what I think you're saying. I'm pretty sure the $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'] is simply doing what I should be typing manually in the initializer file. Then I can use, say, a VIEW_URL path to access the views. Trying it out now to see.

Josh Smith Over a year ago

Yeah, essentially all I really need is this: defined('VIEW_URL') ? null : define('VIEW_URL', '/application/views'); That allows me to call VIEW_URL anywhere in the app without having to constantly figure out the absolute URL.

spkvn · Accepted Answer · 2016-03-22 10:16:43Z

Am I wrong in thinking you could use:

$path = str_replace("/Users/user/Sites/MyWebsite", "localhost",$appPath); echo($path); //returns: localhost/application

Criticism welcome.

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