Get Root Directory Path of a PHP project

Question

I have this folder structure in my PHP project   this is as shown in eclips    -MySystem      Code      Data Access     -Public HTML          css          js          Templates     -resources   When I try this code  echo   SERVER  DOCUMENT ROOT     output is     D  workspace   How can I get the path to RootDirectory of the system  MySystem   without hardcoding the Folder Name

User · Answer

you can try    SERVER  PATH TRANSLATED    quote      Filesystem-  not document root-  based path to the current script  after the server has done any virtual-to-real mapping  Note  As of PHP 4 3 2  PATH TRANSLATED is no longer set implicitly under the Apache 2 SAPI in contrast to the situation in Apache 1  where it s set to the same value as the SCRIPT FILENAME server variable when it s not populated by Apache    This change was made to comply with the CGI specification that PATH TRANSLATED should only exist if PATH INFO is defined  Apache 2 users may use AcceptPathInfo   On inside httpd conf to define PATH INFO   source  php net manual

User · Answer

At this moment  PHP itself does not provide a way to get the project s root directory for sure  But you can implement a very simple method yourself that will do exactly what you re looking for  Solution Create a new file in your project  let say D  workspace MySystem Code FilesManager php  use whatever name and path suit you the best   Then  use the following code   lt  php  class FilesManager     public static function rootDirectory              Change the second parameter to suit your needs     return dirname   FILE    2          Now you can do this in  let s say D  workspace MySystem Code a b c Feature php  echo FilesManager  rootDirectory     And the expected result should be   quot D  workspace MySystem quot   The output will be the same no matter where your  quot feature quot  file is located in the project  Explanation dirname is used to return the parent directory of the first parameter  We use the magic constant   FILE   to give it FilesManager php s path  The second parameter tells how many times to go up in the hierarchy  In this case  we need to do it twice  but it really depends where you put your file in the hierarchy  You can omit the second parameter if you only need to got up once  meaning the file is located in the root  But then  you can return   DIR   directly instead  This solution is guaranteed to work  no matter where the root is located on your server  Unless you end up moving the utility class somewhere else in the hierarchy  Additional note I d avoid using DOCUMENT ROOT for the following reasons  according to this answer    It makes your application dependent on the server  The Apache setup may give an incorrect path to the root directory

User · Answer

Summary  This example assumes you always know where the apache root folder is   var www   and you are trying to find the next folder path  e g    var www my website folder    Also this works from a script or the web browser which is why there is additional code   Code PHP7  function getHtmlRootFolder string  root     var www              -- try to use DOCUMENT ROOT first --      ret   str replace            SERVER  DOCUMENT ROOT          ret   rtrim  ret                      -- if doesn t contain root path  find using this file s loc  path --     if   preg match      root       ret            root   rtrim  root                     root arr   explode       root          pwd arr   explode      getcwd            ret    root    pwd arr count  root arr  - 1              return  preg match      root       ret     rtrim  ret               null      Example  echo getHtmlRootFolder      Output    var www somedir    Details   Basically first tries to get DOCUMENT ROOT if it contains   var www   then use it  else get the current dir  which much exist inside the project  and gets the next path value based on count of the  root path  Note  added rtrim statements to ensure the path returns ending with a     in all cases   It doesn t check for it requiring to be larger than  var www  it can also return  var www  as a possible response

User · Answer

You could also use realpath  realpath  quot   quot   returns your document root  You can call realpath with your specific path  Note that it will NOT work if the target folder or file does not exist  In such case it will return false  which could be useful for testing if a file exists  In my case I needed to specify a path for a new file to be written to disk  and the solution was to append the path relative to document root   filepath   realpath  quot   quot      quot  path to newfile txt quot   Hope this helps anyone

User · Answer

use the PHP function   getcwd    Gets the current working directory

User · Answer

I want to point to the way Wordpress handles this  define   ABSPATH   dirname    FILE               As Wordpress is very heavy used all over the web and also works fine locally I have much trust in this method  You can find this definition on the bottom of your wordpress wp-config php file

User · Answer

echo  pathInPieces   explode DIRECTORY SEPARATOR     FILE     echo  pathInPieces 0  DIRECTORY SEPARATOR

User · Answer

When you say that    SERVER  DOCUMENT ROOT     contains this path   D  workspace   Then D  is what you are looking for  isn t it  In that case you could explode the string by slashes and return the first one    pathInPieces   explode        SERVER  DOCUMENT ROOT     echo  pathInPieces 0     This will output the server s root directory   Update  When you use the constant DIRECTORY SEPARATOR instead of the hardcoded slash       this code is also working under Windows   Update 2  The   SERVER global variable is not always available  On command line  cli  for example  So you should use   DIR   instead of   SERVER  DOCUMENT ROOT      DIR   returns the path of the php file itself

User · Answer

For PHP    5 3 0 try  PHP magic constants     DIR     And make your path relative   For PHP  lt  5 3 0 try  dirname   FILE

[php] Get Root Directory Path of a PHP project

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