PHP get website root absolute URL in server?

Question

I rely heavily in $_SERVER["DOCUMENT_ROOT"] to get absolute paths. However this doesn't work for sites which URLs don't point to the root.

I have sites stored in folders such as:

• site1
• site2

all directly inside the root. Is there a way to get the path in the server where the current site root is?

It should return:

   /var/chroot/home/content/02/6945202/html/site1 // If the site is stored in folder 'site1'
   /var/chroot/home/content/02/6945202/html // If the site is stored in the root

Answer 1

You can simply append dirname($_SERVER['SCRIPT_NAME']) to $_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'].

Update

The website seems to be directory "mounted" on that folder, so SCRIPT_NAME will obviously be /.

So, to make this work you have to use either __DIR__ or dirname(__FILE__) to find out where your script is located in the file system.

Update 2

There's no single index.php controller for the whole site, so that won't work either.

The following expression does a string "subtraction" to find the common path. You have a known prefix (document root), an unknown (the root folder) and a known suffix (the script path), so to find the first two, you take the full absolute path (__FILE__) and subtract the known suffix:

substr(__FILE__, 0, -strlen($_SERVER['SCRIPT_NAME']));

If included files need this value, you must store this in a constant first before including the dependent scripts. .

Answer 2

For future googlers, this also works for me

substr(substr(__FILE__, strlen(realpath($_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT']))), 0, - strlen(basename(__FILE__)));

Answer 3

Just use getcwd() for the current absolute server path of the folder the current script is in.

You can define a constant at the top of your website so that the rest of the website can rely on that path.

define('MY_SERVER_PATH', getcwd());