[php] How to get the current plugin directory in WordPress?

I need to get the current plugin directory like

[wordpress_install_dir]/wp-content/plugins/plugin_name

(if getcwd() called from the plugin, it returns [wordpress_install_dir], the root of installation)

thanks for help

Why not use the WordPress core function that's designed specifically for that purpose?

<?php plugin_dir_path( __FILE__ ); ?>

See Codex documentation here.

You also have

<?php plugin_dir_url( __FILE__ ); ?>

if what you're looking for is a URI as opposed to a server path.

See Codex documentation here.

IMO it's always best to use the highest-level method that's available in core, and this is it. It makes your code more future proof.

To get the plugin directory you can use the Wordpress function plugin_basename($file). So you would use is as follows to extract the folder and filename of the plugin:

$plugin_directory = plugin_basename(__FILE__); 

You can combine this with the URL or the server path of the plugin directory. Therefor you can use the constants WP_PLUGIN_URL to get the plugin directory url or WP_PLUGIN_DIR to get the server path. But as Mark Jaquith mentioned in a comment below this only works if the plugins resides in the Wordpress plugin directory.

Read more about it in the Wordpress codex.

Since WP 2.6.0 you can use plugins_url() method.

Try this:

function PluginUrl() {

        //Try to use WP API if possible, introduced in WP 2.6
        if (function_exists('plugins_url')) return trailingslashit(plugins_url(basename(dirname(__FILE__))));

        //Try to find manually... can't work if wp-content was renamed or is redirected
        $path = dirname(__FILE__);
        $path = str_replace("\\","/",$path);
        $path = trailingslashit(get_bloginfo('wpurl')) . trailingslashit(substr($path,strpos($path,"wp-content/")));
        return $path;
    }

echo PluginUrl(); will return the current plugin url.

If you want to get current directory path within a file for that you can magic constants __FILE__ and __DIR__ with plugin_dir_path() function as:

$dir_path = plugin_dir_path( __FILE__ );

CurrentDirectory Path:

/home/user/var/www/wordpress_site/wp-content/plugins/custom-plugin/

__FILE__ magic constant returns current directory path.

If you want to one level up from the current directory. You should use __DIR__ magic constant as:

Current Path:

/home/user/var/www/wordpress_site/wp-content/plugins/custom-plugin/

$dir = plugin_dir_path( __DIR__ );

One level up path:

 /home/user/var/www/wordpress_site/wp-content/plugins/

__DIR__ magic constant returns one level up directory path.

This will actually get the result you want:

<?php plugin_dir_url(__FILE__); ?>

http://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/plugin_dir_url

$full_path = WP_PLUGIN_URL . '/'. str_replace( basename( __FILE__ ), "", plugin_basename(__FILE__) );

• WP_PLUGIN_URL – the url of the plugins directory
• WP_PLUGIN_DIR – the server path to the plugins directory

This link may help: http://codex.wordpress.org/Determining_Plugin_and_Content_Directories.

When I need to get the directory, not only for the plugins (plugin_dir_path), but a more generic one, you can use __DIR__, it will give you the path of the directory of the file where is called. Now you can used from functions.php or another file!

Description:

The directory of the file. If used inside an include, the directory of the included file is returned. This is equivalent to dirname(__FILE__). This directory name does not have a trailing slash unless it is the root directory. 1