Symlink a plugin in local development, works but got Debug error message - Windows 10

Question

I read that WP 3.9+ supports symlink (Article here).

So, my plugin resides in C:\Github\my-plugin. while my project is at C:\Project\my-site.

I successfully symlink it by using this command (run as admin):

mklink /d C:\Project\my-site\wp-content\plugins\my-plugin C:\Github\my-plugin

The symlinked plugin WORKS but I got this debug message on ALL pages:

Warning: fopen(C:/Project/my-site/wp-content/plugins/my-plugin/C:/Github/my-plugin/index.php):
failed to open stream: Invalid argument in
C:\Project\my-site\wp-includes\functions.php on line 4568

Warning: fread() expects parameter 1 to be resource, boolean given in
C:\Project\my-site\wp-includes\functions.php on line 4571

As you can see the path detected by WordPress is a merge of my-site and my-plugin and thus it can't read the file. But weirdly, the plugin runs fine.

Anyone successfully symlinked a plugin in Windows 10?

Thanks

[EDIT]

Found the issue. I hosted my plugin on Github and has a snippet I found online to enable update via admin panel.

The snippet has hardcoded directory so it doesn't detect symlinked url.

Answer 1

Not sure about the root cause, but you should avoid using relative paths to files. Because they are relative you never sure where exactly a file is being looked after. It might even become a security risk as PHP might look for the file in the default directories.

The proper way is to use the plugin_dir_path, something like

require_once plugin_dir_path(__FILE__).'github-updater.php';