PHP: move_uploaded_file() failed to open stream: No such file or directory

I’m trying to get PHP to move an uploaded file from the tmp directory to somewhere permanent on my webserver. It seems simple enough, but I’m getting this error:

Unable to move 'C:UniServertmpphp3F62.tmp' to 'static/images/slides/1/1.jpg'

Pretty straight-forward, right? It can’t find the destination folder.

My question is: How do I reference the desired target directory?

Is the reference relative to the script’s position on the server? Or is it relative to the URL? Or the PHP DOCUMENT_ROOT? Or the OS’s filesystem? Or something else?

I can’t find the answer in the PHP documentation or indeed in any of the similar questions here on SO..

Can anyone help? Thanks.

Answer

A simple way to keep track of the path is just to define the absolute path in your index.php

define ('SITE_ROOT', realpath(dirname(__FILE__)));

Then just use it like:

move_uploaded_file($_FILES['file']['tmp_name'], SITE_ROOT.'/static/images/slides/1/1.jpg');