How do I get the base URL with PHP?

Function adjusted to execute without warnings:

function url(){
    if(isset($_SERVER['HTTPS'])){
        $protocol = ($_SERVER['HTTPS'] && $_SERVER['HTTPS'] != "off") ? "https" : "http";
    }
    else{
        $protocol = 'http';
    }
    return $protocol . "://" . $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'] . $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'];
}

Try this:

<?php echo "http://" . $_SERVER['SERVER_NAME'] . $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']; ?>

Learn more about the $_SERVER predefined variable.

If you plan on using https, you can use this:

function url(){
  return sprintf(
    "%s://%s%s",
    isset($_SERVER['HTTPS']) && $_SERVER['HTTPS'] != 'off' ? 'https' : 'http',
    $_SERVER['SERVER_NAME'],
    $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']
  );
}

echo url();
#=> http://127.0.0.1/foo

Per this answer, please make sure to configure your Apache properly so you can safely depend on SERVER_NAME.

<VirtualHost *>
    ServerName example.com
    UseCanonicalName on
</VirtualHost>

NOTE: If you're depending on the HTTP_HOST key (which contains user input), you still have to make some cleanup, remove spaces, commas, carriage return, etc. Anything that is not a valid character for a domain. Check the PHP builtin parse_url function for an example.

   $base_url="http://".$_SERVER['SERVER_NAME'].dirname($_SERVER["REQUEST_URI"].'?').'/';

Usage:

print "<script src='{$base_url}js/jquery.min.js'/>";

Fun 'base_url' snippet!

if (!function_exists('base_url')) {
    function base_url($atRoot=FALSE, $atCore=FALSE, $parse=FALSE){
        if (isset($_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'])) {
            $http = isset($_SERVER['HTTPS']) && strtolower($_SERVER['HTTPS']) !== 'off' ? 'https' : 'http';
            $hostname = $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'];
            $dir =  str_replace(basename($_SERVER['SCRIPT_NAME']), '', $_SERVER['SCRIPT_NAME']);

            $core = preg_split('@/@', str_replace($_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'], '', realpath(dirname(__FILE__))), NULL, PREG_SPLIT_NO_EMPTY);
            $core = $core[0];

            $tmplt = $atRoot ? ($atCore ? "%s://%s/%s/" : "%s://%s/") : ($atCore ? "%s://%s/%s/" : "%s://%s%s");
            $end = $atRoot ? ($atCore ? $core : $hostname) : ($atCore ? $core : $dir);
            $base_url = sprintf( $tmplt, $http, $hostname, $end );
        }
        else $base_url = 'http://localhost/';

        if ($parse) {
            $base_url = parse_url($base_url);
            if (isset($base_url['path'])) if ($base_url['path'] == '/') $base_url['path'] = '';
        }

        return $base_url;
    }
}

Use as simple as:

//  url like: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2820723/how-to-get-base-url-with-php

echo base_url();    //  will produce something like: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2820723/
echo base_url(TRUE);    //  will produce something like: http://stackoverflow.com/
echo base_url(TRUE, TRUE); || echo base_url(NULL, TRUE);    //  will produce something like: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/
//  and finally
echo base_url(NULL, NULL, TRUE);
//  will produce something like: 
//      array(3) {
//          ["scheme"]=>
//          string(4) "http"
//          ["host"]=>
//          string(12) "stackoverflow.com"
//          ["path"]=>
//          string(35) "/questions/2820723/"
//      }