Blog Post

by Harry Fuecks

This post has 16 responses so far

1. cyngon Says:
   June 8th, 2004 at 7:29 am

   Just wondering: Are either of those techniques affected if you use mod_rewrite and the address they types into the browser isn’t necessarily the address they end up at?

    
2. Matt Wilson Says:
   June 8th, 2004 at 8:01 am

   I use mod_rewrite heavily, which has a similar effect in that you can’t trust pathnames (although $_SERVER[PHP_SELF] may still work).

   Anyway, my solution is to define a set of variables regarding paths (normally http path and file path, sometimes https), so the only known path necessary is the core included file; everything can use absolute paths using the core include’s defined vars. Example:
   $path['http'] = /var/www/sitex;
   include($path['http'].’/includes/x.php’);

    
3. KillAllDash9 Says:
   June 8th, 2004 at 8:10 am

   It’s not super elegant, but you could start every script with:

   if (!defined(’MAIN_EXEC_DIR’)) define(’MAIN_EXEC_DIR’, dirname(__FILE__));

   Then MAIN_EXEC_DIR would always contain the information you are looking for. Certainly, it’s a pain to have to put this in every file, though.

   Another option is to actually make use of the include_path INI setting, which can also be altered at run time via ini_set().

    
4. cagrET Says:
   June 8th, 2004 at 8:42 am

   I don’t have php as cgi so cannot test it, but maybe this will work (only PHP 4 >= 4.3.0, PHP 5):

   < ?php // common.inc.php if (function_exists('debug_backtrace')) { $tmp = debug_backtrace(); $_SERVER['PATH_TRANSLATED'] = $tmp[0]['file']; } ?>
    
5. cagrET Says:
   June 8th, 2004 at 9:06 am

   Code within WACT then needs to be able to determine where myscript.php is located in the filesystem, so that a users templates, for example, can be located relative to myscript.php’s path.

   Btw.
   Why do you need $_SERVER['PATH_TRANSLATED'] for this ?
   If the script is called like this: http://domain.foo/some/myscript.php, template is here: /some/templates/example.tpl, relative path to template: ‘templates/example.tpl’, why can’t you just do: require ‘templates/example.tpl’ ?

   Or maybe this:

   require $_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'] . dirname($_SERVER['PHP_SELF']) . “/templates/example.tpl”;

    
6. Demian Turner Says:
   June 8th, 2004 at 9:46 am

   Perhaps this is helpful - Seagull dynamically determines the the script location on the filesystem and the web root of the calling URL. To do this each page execution first loads an init file:

   http://muse23.com/cgi-bin/cvsweb.cgi/seagull/init.php?rev=1.84&content-type=text/x-cvsweb-markup

   cheers

   Demian

    
7. HarryF Says:
   June 8th, 2004 at 10:37 am

   [QUOTE=cyngon]Just wondering: Are either of those techniques affected if you use mod_rewrite and the address they types into the browser isn’t necessarily the address they end up at?[/QUOTE]

   Good question. Not sure. Will explore that shortly.

    
8. HarryF Says:
   June 8th, 2004 at 10:46 am

   if (!defined('MAIN_EXEC_DIR')) define('MAIN_EXEC_DIR', dirname(__FILE__));

   I guess that will be the last resort. Would be a shame because it requires WACT users to define it (nice when it could happen automatically).

   < ?php // common.inc.php if (function_exists('debug_backtrace')) { $tmp = debug_backtrace(); $_SERVER['PATH_TRANSLATED'] = $tmp[0]['file']; } ?>

   Good point. OK it’s PHP 4.3.0 only but perhaps we can use that inside some code which makes various guesses (using SCRIPT_FILENAME, PATH_TRANSLATED and any thing that might be useable).

   why can’t you just do: require ‘templates/example.tpl’ ?

   That may be an option to explore. We need the path for various file operations (e.g. writing a “compiled” template script) but fopen also supports using the include_path - good point.

   $_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'] . dirname($_SERVER['PHP_SELF'])

   Possibly - think those are also somewhat subject to the PHP SAPI you’re using but may be useful if we’re doing some sort of detection.

    
9. Davey Says:
   June 8th, 2004 at 12:28 pm

   whilst I was discussing the need for a __MAIN__ constant with Lukas Smith, Ilia chimed in with this little tid-bit:

   array_shift(get_included_files());

   Should work in any PHP version 4.0.0 up :)

   - Davey

    
10. Davey Says:
    June 8th, 2004 at 12:30 pm

    Whilst discussing the need for a __MAIN__ constant with Lukas Smith on IRC, Ilia chimed in with this little tid-bit:

    array_shift(get_included_files());

    Yay Ilia! This should work in PHP 4.0.0+ :)

    - Davey

     
11. Caramdir Says:
    June 8th, 2004 at 2:43 pm

    How about getcwd()? This returns the current working directory, and unlesse the user somewhere used chdir(), the cwd is the dir of the main entry point.

     
12. HarryF Says:
    June 8th, 2004 at 3:13 pm

    array_shift(get_included_files());

    Phew! Nice one Davey - many thanks.

    PS: __MAIN__ would still be cool.

     
13. Davey Says:
    June 8th, 2004 at 6:54 pm

    I know that Ilia is pretty opposed to a __MAIN__ constant… so I guess the only way to do this is:

    if (!defined('__MAIN__')) { define('__MAIN__', array_shift(get_included_files())); }

    - Davey

     
14. hurst Says:
    October 7th, 2004 at 9:46 pm

    I have used the array_shift(get_included_files()) technique successfully until now. On a server with PHP version 4.1.2 using apache with mod_php, the main script was not in this array.
    There is a bug where someone is complaining about the main file being in the array: http://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=25658.
    So unfortunately, this will not always work.

     
15. Rajesh Says:
    June 20th, 2006 at 6:30 am

    I know at least one place where a programmer has used
    eval(file_get_contents(’some_script.php’)) to include a file.
    I don’t exactly remember why but it solved a nice security
    problem.

    The array_shift(get_included_files()) won’t work in this case
    either.

     
16. DW Says:
    July 19th, 2006 at 8:21 am

    getcwd() is the solution I chose :)

     

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