PhP wannabe question- PHP/Apache/mySQL/virtual directory

[rowman]

What is the standard method for writing php pages locally, then uploading them to the web without having to go through and adjust all the includes. On my website I have to store my includes in a file home/site/domains/domainname/public_html/includes.

I tried to create an alias to my local includes file by adding this line to the httpd.conf apache file:

Alias /home/site/domains/domainname/public_html/includes "C:/sokkit/site/includes"

Shouldn't this work? Is this how it's typically done?

[thorpe]

On my website I have to store my includes in a file home/site/domains/domainname/public_html/includes.

why? you can have any file structure you want.

[rowman]

For the include to work, you either have to have the include files in the default listed in the php.ini file (which my provider does not provade access to) or specify the full path to the file. So locally my includes look like:

include ('mysql_connect.php'); (which c:\sokkit\includes is the default include file)

But when I upload the files it has to change to:

include ('/home/site/domains/domainname/public_html/includes/mysql_connect.php');

or the links break. This gets tedious because I tend to use a lot of includes in my scripts so I can make easy global changes.

[Weedpacket]

Instead of hardwiring all your path names, consider using some of the elements of the $_SERVER array to construct them.