PHP Going Multiple Directories Back Best Practice

Question

I'm writing a php library for managing configurations of an application.

but the problem is anyone who uses my library will store their configuration files in ./config folder of their project root directory.

e.g. var/www/example.com/config/site.php

and my library is installed in a sub directory of the project

i.e vendor/azi/config/src/Config.php

To Load files from project root i am doing it this way

    if (!defined('PATH_TO_CONFIG_DIR')) {
        define('PATH_TO_CONFIG_DIR', dirname(dirname(dirname(dirname(dirname(__FILE__))))) . "/config/");
    }

is it right ? Or It can be more efficient. Code suggestion will be helpful.

Github : https://github.com/azeemhassni/Config

Answer 1

Instead of nesting the dirname calls, according to the documentation for dirname you could call this as of PHP 7:

dirname(__FILE__, 5)

For supporting lower versions of PHP, you could write a parentDirectory function:

function parentDirectory($path, $levels) {
    for ($i = 0; $i < $levels; $i++) {
        $path = dirname($path);
    }
    return $path;
}

Or just embed it inside your current code, without a specific function:

$configPath = __FILE__;
for ($i = 0; $i < 5; $i++) {
    $configPath = dirname($configPath);
}
define('PATH_TO_CONFIG_DIR', $configPath . "/config/");