question about URL's in deployment

greedyisg00d

Hi I am just new to web app and I am testing my application through localhost. Therefore all my links and database codes are via localhost for example:

header('location:http://localhost/login.php
mysql_connect('localhost','root','')

My question is in deploying my website online do I need to change my code above since the domain name will not be localhost anymore.

Sample codes is much appreciated. Thanks

laserlight

greedyisg00d wrote:
My question is in deploying my website online do I need to change my code above since the domain name will not be localhost anymore.

Yes. For the case of the location header read the PHP manual's entry on [man]header/man, especially the section that says that you "can usually use $SERVER['HTTP_HOST'], $SERVER['PHP_SELF'] and dirname() to make an absolute URI from a relative one yourself".

For the case of database credentials, you could define them in a file placed outside of your document root. Scripts that needs the database credentials would then include this file and use the configuration variables.

NogDog

A common practice is to define a constant for things like the base URL in a config file that is included by the main application scripts whenever they are run.

config.php:

<?php
define('BASE_URL', 'http://www.example.com/');

sample.php:

<?php
require_once 'config.php';
// . . .
header('Location: ' . BASE_URL . 'directory/page.php');

Then your installation instructions just have to have the user change one line in one file to deal with all such URLs in the application.