Include errors

PHP
1

Hi, I am building my first website in PHP and am having some issues with include files.

Thus far I have done all my dev locally and use the following to find my include files:

include_once $_SERVER[‘DOCUMENT_ROOT’] . ‘/includes/magicquotes.inc.php’;

The path works fine when I run the site locally.

However, when I run the site on my web host’s servers I get this message:

Warning: include_once() [function.include]: Failed opening ‘/usr/local/apache/htdocs/includes/magicquotes.inc.php’ for inclusion (include_path=‘.:/usr/lib/php:/usr/local/lib/php’) in /home/a6375238/public_html/index.php on line 3

Being the noob that I am, I am very confused as to why a local path is being referenced. I assume I am ignorant to some config somewhere. Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks.

2

Huh, that’s odd. If you just upload .php files to your server there should be no reference to your local environment. Is there a database involved here or something like that?

3

Only case can be (or can happen accidentally sometimes) that $_SERVER[‘DOCUMENT_ROOT’] has been reset (assigned some other values) somewhere in your system/php files above the line. Is there any caching mechanism in your code. I don’t think so but that might be another case. So the problem might due to:

  • Assigned a value in $_SERVER[‘DOCUMENT_ROOT’] somewhere above the use.
  • File or the folder has not been uploaded correctly in the correct path.
  • Some caching mechanism working.

Better try this way then:


include_once dirname(__FILE__) . '/includes/magicquotes.inc.php';
4

I tend to do this:


// Somewhere in your global script/init script or whatever, before any includes
define('CWD', (($getcwd = getcwd()) ? $getcwd : '.'));

Then when including scripts


require_once(CWD . '/includes/scripttoinclude.php');

Basically set the current working directory (CWD) as a constant and then the includes will be running from the current path.

5

Ok, this gets a little stranger.

In order to limit the problem to one variable

I just did the following echo

<?php
echo $_SERVER[‘DOCUMENT_ROOT’];

?>

I got this:

/usr/local/apache/htdocs

There is only this one file on the server. It has to be a config issue, right?

6

It’s a consequence of being on a shared host. Just use:
include_once ‘includes/magicquotes.inc.php’;
Later on you can learn how to set your include path so your app can live outside of you web directory.