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PHP Building Websites with PHP Dependency Management Autoloading

Sean Flanagan
Sean Flanagan
33,235 Points
Posted by Sean Flanagan
Sean Flanagan
33,235 Points

Where did the __DIR__ come from?

Hi.

I noticed that at 2 minutes 20 seconds this statement appeared

require '/vendor/autoload.php';

but on getcomposer.org, under Autoloading, I get this:

require __DIR__ . '/vendor/autoload.php';

I'm assuming that the change occurred since the video was published. Which of these should we use?

By the way I've used the first statement, which doesn't have the DIR.

1 Answer

Sergey Podgornyy
Sergey Podgornyy
20,660 Points
Sergey Podgornyy
Sergey Podgornyy
20,660 Points

You can read more about magic constants on php.net

__DIR__ The directory of the file. If used inside an include, the directory of the included file is returned. This is equivalent to dirname(__FILE__). This directory name does not have a trailing slash unless it is the root directory.