[jumbo1]

Hi there

i know how to use the include() funtion, BUT there's my problem: i got a server with several sites of mine, and each site has its own CPanel... and I want to design some PHP files that are to be in common among all these sites... and instead of making a copy of the PHP file in every CPanel, I want to store it in one place and make the other sites' files point to it by including something like:

Code:

include('http://www.centralsite.com/mainpage.php');

but this format does not work... is there a way to perform the task i want??

thank you

[Keith]

Yes, but it's not recommended.



Remove the start and end tags (the first <?php and last ?>) from the files you want to include and rename them to a .txt extension.

So (hypothetically) mainpage.php:

PHP Code:

<?php



$host = $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'];



echo $host;



?>

...becomes mainpage.txt:

Code:

$host = $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'];

echo $host;

Then, to access the file so it parses correctly, use this code:

PHP Code:

<?php



eval( file_get_contents( 'http://www.centralsite.com/mainpage.txt' ) );



?>

The included file should not have a .php extension since the script is simply grabbing the contents of the file and evaluating it as PHP code. If you name it .php, any internal PHP tags could be parsed by the server it's residing on before being sent to the requesting server.

Any file included should be written as a typical PHP file, except you must omit only the start and end PHP tags, and not give it a .php entension.



The reason this is not recommended is because the file must be public to be seen by external servers, and the code is readable because it must be readable by the requesting servers. Because of this, anyone can access and read your code. So try to obfuscate it with really long and weird directory/file names.

Also, if the host server goes down, all external sites using the hosted files cease to function as well.

[mab]

It might be possible to make use of the include_path setting to allow this to function, in the same way that PEAR classes can be included from a common location.

[juggernaut]

I'm not too sure this would work, but if you have all those sites on one server at some point they all have the same path, so the file could be placed in a directory common to all sites... But as I said, I'm not sure this would work...

[jumbo1]

thank you guys

keith, yea, as u said, there's a serious security gap in the method u pointed to... still, it's a valid one... i only need to test it and make sure it works...

unfortunately, there doesnt seem to be a common directory for all sites on the server, and if there were such a dir, i wont use it anyway because it would be accessible by all people who have a site hosted on the same server (it's a shared one).

Thank you

[Keith]

I didn't mention the reduction in load time by having to access a file across the internet on each page load.

If you do go that route, I'd suggest using some type of local file caching so you only have to grab the file, say, once every 15 minutes... or however frequent you want to make it.