melbourne chapter

I have been asked before about using local PEAR libraries (or the like) that you have downloaded and having them run locally, not needing them installed on your hosting server.

To do this we need to add to the include path to point to your library paths.

When PHP looks for a file it checks the path from the current working directory, and then interogates the details it has received from the directive ‘include_path’ and checks there. Typically the include_path contains a directory path to the location that your hosting company has installed the components (PEAR and the like) to.

So, we just need to be able to change classpaths to point to our library folder.

Classpaths (or include paths) are seperated by a delimeter. The delimeter is different depending on what O/S you are operating on. So first we need to determine how to treat the classpath delimeter:

/**
* Returns with the delimeter to use
* @return String Path Delimeter for this O/S
* @access private
*/
function getClassPathDelimeter() {
if(defined(’PATH_SEPARATOR’)) {
return PATH_SEPARATOR;
} else {
// Determine the O/S
$osType = (substr(PHP_OS, 0, 3) == ‘WIN’) ? “WINDOWS” : “UNIX”;
if($osType == ‘WINDOWS’) {
return ‘;’; // Windows
} else {
return ‘:’; // Mac, nix, etc
}
}
}

Say we had our files like this:

myfile.php
lib/PEAR/*

We can make calls in myfile.php to any pear library (without have to fix paths etc) by calling:

$currentClassPath = get_include_path();

$delimiter = getClassPathDelimeter();

$newPath = getcwd() . ‘/lib/PEAR/’; // Don’t have to use getcwd(), could be dirname(__FILE__);, always use ‘/’ regardless of OS

$newClassPath = $currentClassPath . $delimiter . $newPath;

ini_set(’include_path’, $newClassPath);

Ofcourse this can be placed in a shorter version, and reused by making a class called ClassPath and adding the functions for static calls, eg.

ClassPaths::addClassPaths(’/lib/PEAR’, getcwd());

Therefore your setup is reusable and more concise.