Installation¶
CakePHP is simple and easy to install. The minimum requirements are a web server and a copy of CakePHP, that’s it! While this chapter focuses primarily on setting up on Apache (because it’s simple to install and setup), CakePHP will run on a variety of web servers such as nginx, LightHTTPD, or Microsoft IIS.
Requirements
- HTTP Server. For example: Apache. Having mod_rewrite is preferred, but by no means required.
- PHP 5.4.16 or greater.
- mbstring extension
- intl extension
In both XAMPP and WAMP, the mbstring extension is working by default.
In XAMPP, intl extension is included but you have to uncomment extension=php_intl.dll in php.ini and restart the server through the XAMPP Control Panel.
In WAMP, the intl extension is “activated” by default but not working. To make it work you have to go to php folder (by default) C:\wamp\bin\php\php{version}, copy all the files that looks like icu*.dll and paste them into the apache bin directory C:\wamp\bin\apache\apache{version}\bin. Then restart all services and it should be OK.
While a database engine isn’t required, we imagine that most applications will utilize one. CakePHP supports a variety of database storage engines:
- MySQL (5.1.10 or greater)
- PostgreSQL
- Microsoft SQL Server (2008 or higher)
- SQLite 3
All built-in drivers require PDO. You should make sure you have the correct PDO extensions installed.
Installing CakePHP
CakePHP uses Composer, a dependency management tool for PHP 5.3+, as the officially supported method for installation.
First, you’ll need to download and install Composer if you haven’t done so already. If you have cURL installed, it’s as easy as running the following:
curl -s https://getcomposer.org/installer | php
Or, you can download composer.phar from the Composer website.
For Windows systems, you can download Composer’s Windows installer here. Further instructions for Composer’s Windows installer can be found within the README here.
Now that you’ve downloaded and installed Composer, you can get a new CakePHP application by running:
php composer.phar create-project --prefer-dist cakephp/app [app_name]
Or if Composer is installed globally:
composer create-project --prefer-dist cakephp/app [app_name]
Once Composer finishes downloading the application skeleton and the core CakePHP library, you should have a functioning CakePHP application installed via Composer. Be sure to keep the composer.json and composer.lock files with the rest of your source code.
You can now visit the path to where you installed your CakePHP application and see the setup traffic lights.
Although composer is the recommended installation method, there are pre-installed downloads available onGithub. Those downloads contain the app skeleton with all vendor packages installed. Also it includes thecomposer.phar so you have everything you need for further use.
Keeping Up To Date with the Latest CakePHP Changes
By default this is what your application composer.json looks like:
"require": {
"cakephp/cakephp": "~3.0"
}
Each time you run php composer.phar update you will receive the latest stable releases when using the default version constraint ~3.0. Only bugfix and minor version releases of 3.x will be used when updating.
If you want to keep current with the latest unreleased changes in CakePHP you can add the change your application’s composer.json:
"require": {
"cakephp/cakephp": "dev-master"
}
Be aware that is not recommended, as your application can break when next major version is being released. Additionally composer does not cache development branches, so it slows down consecutive composer installs/updates.
Permissions
CakePHP uses the tmp directory for a number of different operations. Model descriptions, cached views, and session information are just a few examples. The logs directory is used to write log files by the default FileLogengine.
As such, make sure the directories logs, tmp and all its subdirectories in your CakePHP installation are writable by the web server user. Composer’s installation process makes tmp and its subfolders globally writeable to get things up and running quickly but you can update the permissions for better security and keep them writable only for the webserver user.
One common issue is that logs and tmp directories and subdirectories must be writable both by the web server and the command line user. On a UNIX system, if your web server user is different from your command line user, you can run the following commands from your application directory just once in your project to ensure that permissions will be setup properly:
HTTPDUSER=`ps aux | grep -E '[a]pache|[h]ttpd|[_]www|[w]ww-data|[n]ginx' | grep -v root | head -1 | cut -d\ -f1`
setfacl -R -m u:${HTTPDUSER}:rwx tmp
setfacl -R -d -m u:${HTTPDUSER}:rwx tmp
setfacl -R -m u:${HTTPDUSER}:rwx logs
setfacl -R -d -m u:${HTTPDUSER}:rwx logs
Development Server
A development installation is the fastest method to setup CakePHP. In this example, we will be using CakePHP’s console to run PHP’s built-in web server which will make your application available at http://host:port. From the app directory, execute:
bin/cake server
By default, without any arguments provided, this will serve your application at http://localhost:8765/.
If you have something conflicting with localhost or port 8765, you can tell the CakePHP console to run the web server on a specific host and/or port utilizing the following arguments:
bin/cake server -H 192.168.13.37 -p 5673
This will serve your application at http://192.168.13.37:5673/.
That’s it! Your CakePHP application is up and running without having to configure a web server.
The development server should never be used in a production environment. It is only intended as a basic development server.
If you’d prefer to use a real webserver, you should be able to move your CakePHP install (including the hidden files) inside your webserver’s document root. You should then be able to point your web-browser at the directory you moved the files into and see your application in action.
Production
A production installation is a more flexible way to setup CakePHP. Using this method allows an entire domain to act as a single CakePHP application. This example will help you install CakePHP anywhere on your filesystem and make it available at http://www.example.com. Note that this installation may require the rights to change theDocumentRoot on Apache webservers.
After installing your application using one of the methods above into the directory of your choosing - we’ll assume you chose /cake_install - your production setup will look like this on the file system:
/cake_install/
bin/
config/
logs/
plugins/
src/
tests/
tmp/
vendor/
webroot/ (this directory is set as DocumentRoot)
.gitignore
.htaccess
.travis.yml
composer.json
index.php
phpunit.xml.dist
README.md
Developers using Apache should set the DocumentRoot directive for the domain to:
DocumentRoot /cake_install/webroot
If your web server is configured correctly, you should now find your CakePHP application accessible athttp://www.example.com.
Fire It Up
Alright, let’s see CakePHP in action. Depending on which setup you used, you should point your browser tohttp://example.com/ or http://localhost:8765/. At this point, you’ll be presented with CakePHP’s default home, and a message that tells you the status of your current database connection.
Congratulations! You are ready to create your first CakePHP application.
URL Rewriting
Apache
While CakePHP is built to work with mod_rewrite out of the box–and usually does–we’ve noticed that a few users struggle with getting everything to play nicely on their systems.
Here are a few things you might try to get it running correctly. First look at your httpd.conf. (Make sure you are editing the system httpd.conf rather than a user- or site-specific httpd.conf.)
These files can vary between different distributions and Apache versions. You may also take a look athttp://wiki.apache.org/httpd/DistrosDefaultLayout for further information.
- Make sure that an .htaccess override is allowed and that AllowOverride is set to All for the correct DocumentRoot. You should see something similar to:
# Each directory to which Apache has access can be configured with respect
# to which services and features are allowed and/or disabled in that
# directory (and its subdirectories).
#
# First, we configure the "default" to be a very restrictive set of
# features.
<Directory />
Options FollowSymLinks
AllowOverride All
# Order deny,allow
# Deny from all
</Directory> - Make sure you are loading mod_rewrite correctly. You should see something like:
LoadModule rewrite_module libexec/apache2/mod_rewrite.so
In many systems these will be commented out by default, so you may just need to remove the leading # symbols.After you make changes, restart Apache to make sure the settings are active.Verify that your .htaccess files are actually in the right directories. Some operating systems treat files that start with ‘.’ as hidden and therefore won’t copy them. - Make sure your copy of CakePHP comes from the downloads section of the site or our Git repository, and has been unpacked correctly, by checking for .htaccess files.CakePHP app directory (will be copied to the top directory of your application by bake):
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^$ webroot/ [L]
RewriteRule (.*) webroot/$1 [L]
</IfModule>CakePHP webroot directory (will be copied to your application’s web root by bake):<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteRule ^ index.php [L]
</IfModule>If your CakePHP site still has problems with mod_rewrite, you might want to try modifying settings for Virtual Hosts. On Ubuntu, edit the file /etc/apache2/sites-available/default (location is distribution-dependent). In this file, ensure that AllowOverride None is changed to AllowOverride All, so you have:<Directory />
Options FollowSymLinks
AllowOverride All
</Directory>
<Directory /var/www>
Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews
AllowOverride All
Order Allow,Deny
Allow from all
</Directory>On Mac OSX, another solution is to use the tool virtualhostx to make a Virtual Host to point to your folder.For many hosting services (GoDaddy, 1and1), your web server is actually being served from a user directory that already uses mod_rewrite. If you are installing CakePHP into a user directory (http://example.com/~username/cakephp/), or any other URL structure that already utilizes mod_rewrite, you’ll need to add RewriteBase statements to the .htaccess files CakePHP uses (.htaccess, webroot/.htaccess).This can be added to the same section with the RewriteEngine directive, so for example, your webroot .htaccess file would look like:<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /path/to/app
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteRule ^ index.php [L]
</IfModule>The details of those changes will depend on your setup, and can include additional things that are not related to CakePHP. Please refer to Apache’s online documentation for more information. - (Optional) To improve production setup, you should prevent invalid assets from being parsed by CakePHP. Modify your webroot .htaccess to something like:
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /path/to/app/
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/(webroot/)?(img|css|js)/(.*)$
RewriteRule ^ index.php [L]
</IfModule>The above will simply prevent incorrect assets from being sent to index.php and instead display your webserver’s 404 page.Additionally you can create a matching HTML 404 page, or use the default built-in CakePHP 404 by adding anErrorDocument directive:ErrorDocument 404 /404-not-found
nginx
nginx does not make use of .htaccess files like Apache, so it is necessary to create those rewritten URLs in the site-available configuration. This is usually found in /etc/nginx/sites-available/your_virtual_host_conf_file. Depending upon your setup, you will have to modify this, but at the very least, you will need PHP running as a FastCGI instance:
server {
listen 80;
server_name www.example.com;
rewrite ^(.*) http://example.com$1 permanent;
}
server {
listen 80;
server_name example.com;
# root directive should be global
root /var/www/example.com/public/webroot/;
index index.php;
access_log /var/www/example.com/log/access.log;
error_log /var/www/example.com/log/error.log;
location / {
try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php?$args;
}
location ~ \.php$ {
try_files $uri =404;
include /etc/nginx/fastcgi_params;
fastcgi_pass 127.0.0.1:9000;
fastcgi_index index.php;
fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
}
}
On some servers (Like Ubuntu 14.04) the above configuration won’t work out of the box, and the nginx docs recommend a different approach anyway (http://nginx.org/en/docs/http/converting_rewrite_rules.html). You might try the following (you’ll notice this is also just one server {} block, rather than two, although if you want example.com to resolve to your CakePHP application in addition to www.example.com consult the nginx link above):
server {
listen 80;
server_name www.example.com;
rewrite 301 http://www.example.com$request_uri permanent;
# root directive should be global
root /var/www/example.com/public/webroot/;
index index.php;
access_log /var/www/example.com/log/access.log;
error_log /var/www/example.com/log/error.log;
location / {
try_files $uri /index.php?$args;
}
location ~ \.php$ {
try_files $uri =404;
include /etc/nginx/fastcgi_params;
fastcgi_pass 127.0.0.1:9000;
fastcgi_index index.php;
fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
}
}
IIS7 (Windows hosts)
IIS7 does not natively support .htaccess files. While there are add-ons that can add this support, you can also import htaccess rules into IIS to use CakePHP’s native rewrites. To do this, follow these steps:
- Use Microsoft’s Web Platform Installer to install the URL Rewrite Module 2.0 or download it directly (32-bit / 64-bit).
- Create a new file called web.config in your CakePHP root folder.
- Using Notepad or any XML-safe editor, copy the following code into your new web.config file:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<configuration>
<system.webServer>
<rewrite>
<rules>
<rule name="Exclude direct access to webroot/*"
stopProcessing="true">
<match url="^webroot/(.*)$" ignoreCase="false" />
<action type="None" />
</rule>
<rule name="Rewrite routed access to assets(img, css, files, js, favicon)"
stopProcessing="true">
<match url="^(img|css|files|js|favicon.ico)(.*)$" />
<action type="Rewrite" url="webroot/{R:1}{R:2}"
appendQueryString="false" />
</rule>
<rule name="Rewrite requested file/folder to index.php"
stopProcessing="true">
<match url="^(.*)$" ignoreCase="false" />
<action type="Rewrite" url="index.php"
appendQueryString="true" />
</rule>
</rules>
</rewrite>
</system.webServer>
</configuration>
Once the web.config file is created with the correct IIS-friendly rewrite rules, CakePHP’s links, CSS, JavaScipt, and rerouting should work correctly.
I Can’t Use URL Rewriting
If you don’t want or can’t get mod_rewrite (or some other compatible module) up and running on your server, you’ll need to use CakePHP’s built in pretty URLs. In config/app.php, uncomment the line that looks like:
'App' => [
// ...
// 'baseUrl' => env('SCRIPT_NAME'),
]
Also remove these .htaccess files:
/.htaccess
webroot/.htaccess
This will make your URLs look like www.example.com/index.php/controllername/actionname/param rather than www.example.com/controllername/actionname/param.
