Thread

When (mt) recently upgrade their systems, the absolute path for my virtual server was rendered obsolete.

Since EE theme, template, and download directories are specified in the CP with absolute paths, this change took down all my sites.

It was incredibly time-consuming to go change all of them to the new absolute path. (disclaimer: There’s probably a 2-second UNIXy solution that I could have used if I knew my way around the shell better…)

Are there any alternatives to using absolute paths to specify directories in the CP? (And does EE2 also require installations to use absolute paths for some stuff?)

Let me go on record here by saying that changing system paths without giving your users sufficient advance warning is pretty irresponsible in my book. There is no magic “shell wizard” solution, because these values are stored in the database, not the file system. That said, there are a few things you can do. Check out this article, and, of course, the Deeploy Helper.

As to EE2: no one can say yet 😊

you can use the find & replace utility in the control panel to modify all your site preferences paths.  just type in what it used to be and what it is now and hit submit… all done.  When I migrate a database from dev to live for the first time, I use this to change all the file system paths to the new values and it works great.

If you go with the adding variables to config.php you shouldn’t have to do any search and replacing, it should just work. The only thing it doesn’t work for (AFAIK) is file upload locations but at least they won’t result in your site getting broken until you can update them.