including files in a higher directory

weekender

I'm messing around with creating better structure in one of my apps. The root of the app is

/projects/manager/

although this will change over different deployment servers. All config vars are stored in

/projects/manager/config.php

A section of the site is stored in

/projects/manager/sections/user/

and this file needs to begin by including config.php from the app root (which is not necessarily the same as the www root).

I know i could use

include "/projects/manager/config.php";

but then i'd have to change the url for each seperate deployment. I could put the url in the config file, but then how do i load the config file?

I realise i could do some fancy footwork with [man]parse_url[/man], but again i'd have to put this functionality in each file.

So how do other people do it?

drew010

if the directory structures will stay the same you can use relative paths...
for example in the scripts in
/projects/manager/sections/user/
you can always
include "../../config.php";
which takes you to the /projects/manager folder

when you are in /projects/manager
you can just
include "./config.php";

weekender

aha! thanks Drew, i hadn't realised you could 'stack' the .. like that

still would like a way of doing it the same for all dirs, though

drew010

i suppose you could use
dirname($SERVER['SCRIPT_FILENAME']) to give you the full path to the folder of where the current script resides. from there you can still use a relative path on it.
like
include dirname($SERVER['SCRIPT_FILENAME']) . "/../../config.php";

but ultimately its the same as
include "../../config.php";
just an extra instruction in there.