I'm building a local web application for my company, and I`m trying to run it in an xampp webserver. My problem is that I want to setup my root folder one time, and reference it in all my files.
For example, my folder structure is as follows:
root/index.php
root/include/includefiles.php
root/reles/ajustes/ajustes.php
root/classes/html/menu.php
root/classes/html/rodape.php
root/img/head.png
All of my files have to include the files menu.php and rodape.php
Using relative paths I would do "include ../../classes/html/menu.php" and "../classes/html/menu.php"
Until there it's ok, but in my menu.php file I have a link to other files, and I cannot utilize relative paths to link to it, because at index.php the link would be "/img/head.png" and at ajustes.php would be "../../img/head.png"
My solution is to define a root path, and I would link all my relative paths to ROOT_PATH."/img/head.png".
I found some solutions for this which worked. My problem appears when I try to access my application externally, from another computer using my host IP address, I can access my website, but the link appears as "c:/xampp/htdocs...", and I don't want that, I want the links appearing as "http://host-ip/img/head.png".
A good practice in defining the include paths is to add the __DIR__ magic constant before the include path. That way the path is always defined relative to the directory of the current file instead of the working directory.
You should have a different root path for public urls and internal server paths. So I'd recommend using the __DIR__ for includes and other internal server paths and another constant to be used in html and other public paths.
Edit: To clarify: the internal server path is the actual path on the server (www_root/foo/bar) and the public path is the one the server software serves through http (http://example.com/foo/bar)