Listing all the folders subfolders and files in a directory using php

function listFolderFiles($dir){
    $ffs = scandir($dir);

    unset($ffs[array_search('.', $ffs, true)]);
    unset($ffs[array_search('..', $ffs, true)]);

    // prevent empty ordered elements
    if (count($ffs) < 1)
        return;

    echo '<ol>';
    foreach($ffs as $ff){
        echo '<li>'.$ff;
        if(is_dir($dir.'/'.$ff)) listFolderFiles($dir.'/'.$ff);
        echo '</li>';
    }
    echo '</ol>';
}

listFolderFiles('Main Dir');

Try using absolute file paths if your PHP scripts can be invoked (or requested) from different directories. For example, the current directory of a PHP script executed under example.com/one.php will be different from example.com/folder/two.php.

Your change to

$config['etc'] = parse_ini_file('../config/config.txt');

is still relative, except this time it's just "one directory up from the current directory > config > config.txt", rather than before, where you were looking in the same current directory.

A generic fix would be to do the following:

$root = $_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'];
// ... code ...
$config['etc'] = parse_ini_file($root . '/config/config.txt');

There are possible issues with using the DOCUMENT_ROOT field, but it should be fine for the most part (such as DOCUMENT_ROOT not being defined under the CLI). Also, check if DOCUMENT_ROOT has a trailing slash, even though the standard is not to have it, some hosts may have the trailing slash included. If it does, remove your slash at the beginning of your file path.

Assuming you are trying to access the remote server using HTTP, you won't be able to do this directly. Since HTTP is really going access the web service of your remote server, it controls how the files are presented to you. In the case of many web servers, you can turn on "indexes" for folder contents. This causes the entries in the folder to be displayed in your browser as HTML. In order to traverse the directory structure, you would need to parse this HTML to find the path information.

If you are using FTP, you can pass the ftp://... URL to opendir() as of version 5.0. Note that this capability can be turned off by your server admin. If you cannot use this feature directly, see the FTP functions manual for PHP (including ftp_nlist() for listing files).

An example from the above references:

<?php

// set up basic connection
$conn_id = ftp_connect($ftp_server);

// login with username and password
$login_result = ftp_login($conn_id, $ftp_user_name, $ftp_user_pass);

// get contents of the current directory
$contents = ftp_nlist($conn_id, ".");

// output $contents
var_dump($contents);

?>