Simon Willison’s Weblog

PHP auto class inclusion

26th June 2002

When developing PHP applications, I usually have a classes directory somewhere in which I keep all of my PHP classes ready for inclusion. I name the class files ClassName.class.php. Normally I have a common.inc.php file that is included in all of the scripts in my application and requires the classes needed by the application, but today I wrote a few lines of code that saves me from having to alter that file every time I write a new class:

<php
$classesDirectory = 'classes/';
$classesExtension = '.class.php';
// require_once all classes in that directory
$d = dir($classesDirectory);
while (false !== ($entry = $d->read())) {
    // Check extension
    if (substr($entry, -(strlen($classesExtension))) == $classesExtension) {
        require_once($classesDirectory.$entry);
    }
}
$d->close();
// print_r(get_declared_classes());
?>

It’s nothing revolutionary, but it’s already saving me development time by allowing me to save a file straight in to the directory and instantly have the new class available to all scripts in the application.