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PHP Enhancing a Simple PHP Application Cleaning URLs with Subfolders Using Absolute Server Paths

Greg Kaleka
Greg Kaleka
39,021 Points
Posted by Greg Kaleka
Greg Kaleka
39,021 Points

$_SERVER["DOCUMENT_ROOT"] directory does not include my site.

$_SERVER["DOCUMENT_ROOT"] didn't work for me. I got an error message that looked like this:

Warning: include(/Library/WebServer/Documents/inc/header.php): failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /Users/Greg/Sites/shirts4mike/receipt/index.php on line 7

I took a look in the terminal to see what was in /Library/WebServer/Documents, and it included two PoweredByMac icons and index.html.en, which is the It works! message.

Is my configuration totally screwed up? I already had to adjust my root relative URLs, since they're at /~greg/shirts4mike.

Thanks in advance for any insight!

1 Answer

mikes02
mikes02
Courses Plus Student 16,968 Points

In what way are you using

<?php
$_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT']
?>

It looks like you are having an error related to a PHP include on line 7 of your index file, I'm assuming that's where you include your header.php file? Have you tried just:

<?php
include('inc/header.php');
?>

or perhaps

<?php 
   $path = $_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'];
   $path .= "/inc/header.php";
   include($path);
?>

that should fix your relative file paths.

Greg Kaleka
Greg Kaleka
39,021 Points
Greg Kaleka
Greg Kaleka
39,021 Points

Mike,

Thanks for the response. Following along in the course, I previously had the first code you suggested, which was working fine:

<?php
include('inc/header.php');
?>

The instruction has you change it to the following for more flexibility:

<?php
include($_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'] . "/inc/header.php");
?>

Which is essentially equivalent to your code. The problem appears to be that none of my documents are actually in the DOCUMENT_ROOT directory.

Note, I do not have MAMP installed. Rather, I installed PHP on its own, and configured Apache, both using the terminal. I'm sure there's something about the way I have my configuration set up that's not pointing to the right place...

mikes02
mikes02
Courses Plus Student 16,968 Points

I would guess it's a configuration issue with Apache, then. You should be able to change the document root in Apache though to get it working.