web site root

I'm not understanding the problem. http://localhost is the root of your local server, the same as /index.php.

Is there a particular problem with your site on your local server that you're experiencing?

 

If I understand correctly, Dunmail wants to locally preview a site using absolute URLs (or semi-absolute; whatever you call things referenced to the server root as /).

I don't believe it's possible to easily do this with straight file:// access, but the quickest method I'm aware of is:

1. Turn on Web Sharing in the Sharing preference pane, so Apache is running
2. Then put your site in the default Apache root folder, located at /Library/WebServer/Documents/ on your system drive.
3. Now when you go to http://localhost/ you should get the contents of that folder served to you, and URLs starting with / will work properly.

There will be some default Apache pages there, which you can delete. It will also properly serve default index.html pages without having to explicitly state the filename in the URL, which doesn't work with the file schema. You can also turn on PHP or SSI or other scripting languages to preview dynamically generated content live this way, since it's being served via a full Apache.

You could also set your computer up to handle virtual hosts if you wanted to preview multiple sites, but that's getting more complicated.

 

I suggest looking at VirtualHost as a solution. It's what I use to test multiple sites locally using one instance of Apache.

 

It sounds like you just need a refresher on Relative Linking http://www.webreference.com/html/tutorial2/3.html

once you know where your base url is.. you should be able to construct relative links in your various index pages that all reference back without having to rewrite them each time.

M

 

I think the OP is talking mainly about the / operator to stay within his 'local' directory, rather then building a relative href each time. This would help with deployment of individual sites which are under one domain. If he was to use relative URLl each time, once that 'local directory' became its own full blown domain, he would eithe r have to rewrite the href's or change hte structure of his site.

@OP: I second Angel's suggestion and go with Virtual Host. Other then that, I'm pretty sure your request can be achieved by .htaccess, but this would be slightly more difficult.

 

Are you using cPanel? If so, your home dir is:

Code:

/home/username

 

Virtual hosting is the only thing that will do what you want. That's how shared hosts do it.