Magento/Zend not allowing symbolic links

Anyone know why Magento won't allow symbolic links for template .phtml files that are outside the app/design folder?

If I do a symlink within that folder, it works fine, but if it's linked outside that, it doesn't work. So it seems like it's some permissions/security thing, but I can't find any info anywhere.

Possibly a Zend setting? http://zend-framework-community.634137.n4.nabble.com/Zend-Tool-not-working-with-symbolic-links-in-include-path-td662569.html

Anyone?

WORKAROUND: Thanks to Alan's suggestion below I found a workaround - as I'll only be using this myself for local development I'm happy enough. In case this helps anyone else, I'm gonna add it here. So I'm inserting the following in core/Mage/Core/Block/Template.php, directly after the line Varien_Profiler::start($fileName);

    $storeId = Mage::app()->getStore()->getId();
    $theme = Mage::getStoreConfig('design/package/name', $storeId);
    Mage::Log($this->_viewDir.DS.$fileName); 
    $includes = $this->_viewDir.D开发者_如何转开发S.$fileName; 
    if(strpos($includes, 'frontend/'.$theme )) { 
         include $this->_viewDir.DS.$fileName;
        };

Using the IF statement here stops any base templates being doubled, and only allows your custom theme templates through.

As of Magento 1.5.1.0 (maybe 1.5.x?) there is an option at System > Configuration > Developer > Template Settings > Allow Symlinks that you can enable.

No need for dirty hacks/workarounds anymore. :-)

This was caused by a change in 1.4.2 where Magento no longer allows symlinked folders. If you look in Template.php

        $includeFilePath = realpath($this->_viewDir . DS . $fileName);
        if (strpos($includeFilePath, realpath($this->_viewDir)) === 0) {
            include $includeFilePath;
        } else {
            Mage::log('Not valid template file:'.$fileName, Zend_Log::CRIT, null, null, true);

        }

you see that it won't load if the template is not under the "viewDir".

found another nice little solution which works for me:

sshfs 192.168.1.12:/srv/www/vhosts/dev.****.*****.de/media/catalog/product/ catalog/product/ -o allow_other

this mounts the remote file system via sshfs, allow_other option is necesarry to make the files mounted from the remote box without the remote box file rights:

This option will allow you to use -o allow_other in your SSHFS command which will allow your non-root user access to the specific resource you're mounting.

hope this helps to anyone of you

I am also using symlinks to my custom code and I managed to overcome this issue by using mount --bind instead of creating symlinks, e.g. custom theme directory: /home/user/workspace/magento/app/design/frontend/default/mytheme

cd <magento dir>/app/design/frontend/default
mkdir mytheme
sudo mount --bind /home/user/workspace/magento/app/design/frontend/default/mytheme mytheme

This method will not work on OSX.

Add some logging code to the base template block

#File: app/code/core/Mage/Core/Block/Template.php
public function fetchView($fileName)
{
    ...
    Mage::Log($this->_viewDir.DS.$fileName); 
    var_dump($this->_viewDir.DS.$fileName);
    include $this->_viewDir.DS.$fileName;
    ...
}

Ultimately, rendering a template block is a call to include with a system path. Once you get the path Magento is constructing to your template, create a one line PHP file

<?php
include('/path/that/was/logged/foo.phtml');

And attempt to load the template. This should allow you to isolate the reason any particular call to include is failing. My immediate guess is a PHP safe mode setting, but it's been a long time since I had to fight shared hosting restrictions.

Good luck!