How to go up a level in the src path of a URL in HTML?

Question

I am storing style sheets in {root}/styles while images in {root}/images for a website. How do I give the path in the style sheets to go look in the images directory for the specified images?

e.g. In background-image: url('/images/bg.png');

Solution 1

Use .. to indicate the parent directory:

background-image: url('../images/bg.png');

Solution 2

Here is all you need to know about relative file paths:

• Starting with / returns to the root directory and starts there

• Starting with ../ moves one directory backward and starts there

• Starting with ../../ moves two directories backward and starts there (and so on...)

• To move forward, just start with the first sub directory and keep moving forward.

Click here for more details!

Solution 3

Use ../:

background-image: url('../images/bg.png');

You can use that as often as you want, e.g. ../../images/ or even at different positions, e.g. ../images/../images/../images/ (same as ../images/ of course)

Solution 4

In Chrome when you load a website from some HTTP server both absolute paths (e.g. /images/sth.png) and relative paths to some upper level directory (e.g. ../images/sth.png) work.

But!

When you load (in Chrome!) a HTML document from local filesystem you cannot access directories above current directory. I.e. you cannot access ../something/something.sth and changing relative path to absolute or anything else won't help.

Solution 5

If you store stylesheets/images in a folder so that multiple websites can use them, or you want to re-use the same files on another site on the same server, I have found that my browser/Apache does not allow me to go to any parent folder above the website root URL. This seems obvious for security reasons - one should not be able to browse around on the server any place other than the specified web folders.

Eg. does not work: www.mywebsite.com/../images

As a workaround, I use Symlinks:

Go to the directory of www.mywebsite.com Run the command ln -s ../images images

Now www.mywebsite.com/images will point to www.mywebsite.com/../images

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Comments

[aateeque]

I read that elsewhere as well- but it doesn't work! (at least in Chrome)

[ThiefMaster]

It does. However note that the location is relative to the CSS file's location, not the document embedding the CSS file.

[aateeque]

Upon rechecking, I can report that the local file system relative-paths by using ../ do work fine - or at least does work fine in this specific case!

[gabn88]

It does work on linux and windows, not on mac (my experience)

[1000Gbps]

@ThiefMaster It should be if we're using only inline CSS

[jaboja]

Links do not count here, as there is no same origin check for them. Also this answer is 6 years old so browsers may have changed a lot.

[webzy]

what is symlinks?

[Leendert]

"A symlink (also called a symbolic link) is a type of file in Linux that points to another file or a folder on your computer. Symlinks are similar to shortcuts in Windows. Some people call symlinks "soft links" – a type of link in Linux/UNIX systems – as opposed to "hard links." " ------ from freecodecamp.org/news/…