include issue

[rpupkin77]

Hello,

my file structure has my _includes directory at the document root of my site (on Apache) .

I want to say include("/includes......") and have it work as opposed to having to include the relative paths based upon where the file is located - I know that php looks at "/includes" differently than HTML does.

Is there an apache config I need to change?

[HalfaBee]

You can set the include path directive in php.ini to look at a set directory path in your webspace.
So include( xxx ) will check for that file in a set location first.

eg
include_path=".:/php/includes"
looks for files in . (current dir) and then /php/includes

[bradgrafelman]

You can also use the 'DOCUMENT_ROOT' server variable:

include $_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'] . '/includes/myfile.php';

If not, you can always do as HalfaBee suggests and modify the include_path PHP directive to include your 'includes' directory in the default path. If you don't have access to the php.ini file (or don't want to make this change global), you can use the 'php_value' command in a .htaccess file to achieve the same result.