warning-include-require-failed-stream.md

title	updated	permalink
How to fix failed to open stream warning?	November 20, 2016	/faq/warning-failed-to-open-stream/

A common warning when working with PHP can be:

Warning: include(myinclude.php): failed to open stream: No such file or directory in myfile.php on line 1

Why does this happen?

You have some lines to include a file like this:

<?php
  include 'myinclude.php';
?>

while your folder tree view is like this:

/includes/myinclude.php

index.php

Now PHP can not find the file myinclude.php because it is not in the same directory as the index.php.

How to fix this?

A basic fix for this is setting the appropriate directory. For this example:

<?php
  include 'includes/myinclude.php';  
?>

What if the included file is in a different subfolder then the including file?

Sometimes we have a file tree view like this:

files/index.php

includes/myinclude.php

in this case a simple

<?php
  include '../includes/myinclude.php';  
?>

would do the trick, however the best practice for this case is to use script dir centric paths:

<?php
  include __DIR__.'/../includes/myinclude.php';  
?>