How to get the path of a derived class from an inherited method?

Question

How to get the path of the current class, from an inherited method?

I have the following:

Answer 1

Yes. Building on Palantir's answer:

   class Parent  {
      protected function getDir() {
         $rc = new ReflectionClass(get_class($this));
         return dirname($rc->getFileName());
      }
   }

Answer 2

If you are using Composer for autoloading you can retrieve the directory without reflection.

$autoloader = require 'project_root/vendor/autoload.php';
// Use get_called_class() for PHP 5.3 and 5.4
$file = $autoloader->findFile(static::class);
$directory = dirname($file);

Answer 3

<?php // file: /parentDir/class.php
   class Parent  {
      const FILE = __FILE__;
      protected function getDir() {
         return dirname($this::FILE);
      }
   }
?>


<?php // file: /childDir/class.php
   class Child extends Parent {
      const FILE = __FILE__;
      public function __construct() {
         echo $this->getDir(); 
      }
   }
   $tmp = new Child(); // output: '/childDir'
?>

Please not that if you need to get the dir, directly use __DIR__.

Answer 4

Using ReflectionClass::getFileName with this will get you the dirname the class Child is defined on.

$reflector = new ReflectionClass("Child");
$fn = $reflector->getFileName();
return dirname($fn);

You can get the class name of an object with get_class() :)

Answer 5

You can also pass the directory as constructor arg. Not super elegant, but at least you don't have to work with reflection or composer.

Parent:

<?php // file: /parentDir/class.php
   class Parent  {
      private $directory;

      public function __construct($directory) {
          $this->directory = $directory;
      }

      protected function getDir() {
         return $this->directory;
      }
   }
?>

Child:

<?php // file: /childDir/class.php
   class Child extends Parent {
      public function __construct() {
        parent::__construct(realpath(__DIR__));
        echo $this->getDir(); 
      }
   }
?>

Answer 6

Don't forget, since 5.5 you can use class keyword for the class name resolution, which would be a lot faster than calling get_class($this). The accepted solution would look like this:

protected function getDir() {
    return dirname((new ReflectionClass(static::class))->getFileName());
}