Webpage 'Bootstraping'?

[figment]

I am trying to find a way to always tell where the 'Base Directory' of a web direcory is relative to where I am browsing at the moment...
Example:

here is a sample web directory

/home/www/website/

the /website/ directory is the place where Apache is pointed to so .../website/ becomes http://foo.bar
(between front end and backend)

so I have a bunch of subdirectories underall that and sub-sub directories (....you get the point)

What is a good way to RELATIVLY point back to the base directory? (in thsi case that would be /home/www/website || http://foo.bar)

because typing:

include ("/home/www/website/inc/includeme.inc");

is not what I want to do, i'd much rather type:

if (!$BASEDIR) {
    for($c=1; $c < substr_count($_SERVER["PHP_SELF"], "/"); $c++) {
        $BASEDIR = $BASEDIR."../";
    }
    unset($c);
}
include ($BASEDIR."inc/includeme.inc");

This way I can migrate the entire site to another directory, or to another server, or whatever, and not have to recode, search-replace lines of code in larger sites.

The goal is portability. But is there a better way to do this than the $BASEDIR method I've been using above?

Thanks!

[phynias]

just do
include('./foo.php');
or include('../foo.php');

[rrijnders]

Try $DOCUMENT_ROOT

[figment]

$DOCUMENT_ROOT worked 🙂 thanks!