[Resolved] [Resolved] chicken and egg problem with paths.

counterclockwis

I have a problem which probably isn't that hard to fix, but for the life of me, i cant see how.

I'm writing my first big ish php project (a CMS) and it needs to be portable between different machines and different host names and so on. A user can install it to any installation directory they should desire, but, almost every PHP script needs to know the dirctory that the CMS has been installed to. Since this will change if installed on a different machine, I can't enter it staticly, so I thought (I was tired) I'd stick it in a conf file. However, the conf file is under the CMS's installed directory. The only way I can see of making this work is to put the conf file in /etc/, which (I assume) means IIS machines couldn't run the system, and that assumes the installing user has root access to the server...

A go-ahead with the /etc option, or a solution, either would be appreciated.

Josh

superwormy

You definitally SHOULD NOT be putting the file in the /etc directory. That's a NO NO.

The best bet is probably a directory structure like this:

/path/to/server_root/
/path/to/server_root/config.conf.php

/path/to/server_root/html_public_files_directory/
/path/to/server_root/html_public_files_directory/your_script.php

The first lines of your_script.php:

<?php

require_once("../config.conf.php");

// do stuff

The first lines of config.conf.php:

<?php

$USER_SET_FULL_PATH_TO_FILES = "/path/to/server_root/";

Every PHP file includes the config.conf.php file, and then has available to it the configuration stuff in the config.conf.php file. No absolute paths required except for that one entry in teh config.conf.php file.

counterclockwis

thanks, that's helpful. i didn't think /etc was a good idea!

I was thinking more in terms of a text config file, which would be read using the file functions, not a PHP one, but that makes more sense and looks like it'll be tidier. thanks a lot for the quick resolution =)

Weedpacket

Originally posted by counterclockwis
I was thinking more in terms of a text config file, which would be read using the file functions, not a PHP one, but that makes more sense and looks like it'll be tidier.

Although you might want to look at [man]parse_ini_file[/man]; it would make for a simpler configuration file, and finding arbitrary configuration items would be a bit more predictable and controllable.

superwormy

Yeah, if you want to go a non-PHP config file route, parse_ini_file and ini.php files are very, very sweet for this purpose. Thats what I use all the time.

counterclockwis

ok, I'll look in to it - thanks for all the help guys!