moving website to doteasy - best place to put database constants?

Question

This is my first time moving a locally-hosted PHP site to a hosting service. My site is built with the inc folder (which includes the database constants) outside of the web root, so on my local machine it's in

XAMPP/xamppfiles/htdocs/inc/

and the rest of the files, including the common/ directory, are in

XAMPP/xamppfiles/htdocs/mydomain/

Most of the pages call

include_once "common/base.php";

which lives inside

htdocs/mydomain/common/

and which includes the database constants by calling

include_once $_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'] . "/inc/constants.inc.php";

On my local site, $_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'] outputs "Applications/XAMPP/xamppfiles/htdocs/", and the inc files are found.

Unfortunately, on the DotEasy site, the files aren't being found. If I echo $_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'], the output is "/home/myusername/public_html".

I'm able to get to the inc/ directory by this:

$temp_path = $_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'];
$temp_path = str_replace('public_html', '', $temp_path);
include_once $temp_path . "/inc/constants.inc.php";

but is this a good idea? Am I wrong to worry about having the constants in the public_html folder?

I suggest you move the constants file into your inc folder, and instead of doing the whole str_replace thing, just give it a relative path (../constants.inc.php). — Ansari

xdazz xdazz · Accepted Answer · 2012-05-15T01:53:56

Don't use $_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'].

Instead you should define the root directory based by one file, for example in the config file.

define('ROOT', __DIR__); //php >= 5.3

or

define('ROOT', dirname(__FILE__)); // php < 5.3

The use the ROOT as the base to include other file.

moving website to doteasy - best place to put database constants?

1 Answers