How can I access files outside webroot within an HTML tag?

Question

I am on a shared host and do not have access to the php.ini or apache config files. I have PHP class files stored outside webroot that I need to access with HTML and I know that

<form action="../../classes/someclass.php" method="post">

will not work.

What kind of PHP script would I have to write to be able to access these files?

Answer 1

You would need to write a controller or proxy that's accessible and will route the request down to the desired class.

/someclassproxy.php

Inside that script you would have:

require '../../classes/someclass.php';

However, it's not common practice to have internal classes handle requests directly. Rather, the controller should use the class to handle the request.

Answer 2

You can't POST to nested files, but you can access files within your designated shared directory.

So suppose you have access to home/var/www/ or something like that. and have NO access above www.

You might have your site within a directory on that level, so your site would be at

home/var/www/yoursite

Now, suppose you had a file called config.php in the www folder. Suppose you ALSO have a file called post.php in the yoursite folder.

post.php can easily include config.php:

<?php 
include('../config.php');

?>

but obviously you cannot post to config.php because it is above the site's designated directory.

HOWEVER -

I don't think this is news to you. I'm not sure I understand your problem 100% since you seem to know enough to know you can access files with include...

Maybe I just don't get your question. Feel free to clarify any more than you think you already have. Or at least explain why you can't use a basic include