Introduction

So now you know everything there is to know about the structure and purpose of all the CakePHP libraries, or you have skipped to this part because you don't care about that stuff and just want to start playing. Either way, you're ready to get your hands dirty.

This chapter will describe what must be installed on the server, different ways to configure your server, downloading and installing CakePHP, bringing up the default CakePHP page, and some troubleshooting tips just in case everything does not go as planned.

Requirements

In order use CakePHP you must first have a server that has all the required libraries and programs to run CakePHP:

Server Requirements

Here are the requirements for setting up a server to run CakePHP:

1. An HTTP server (like Apache) with the following enabled: sessions, mod_rewrite (not absolutely necessary but preferred)

2. PHP 4.3.2 or greater. Yes, CakePHP works great in either PHP 4 or 5.

3. A database engine (right now, there is support for MySQL 4+, PostgreSQL and a wrapper for ADODB).

Installing CakePHP

Getting the most recent stable version

There are a few ways you can secure a copy of CakePHP: getting a stable release from CakeForge, grabbing a nightly build, or getting a fresh version of code from SVN.

To download a stable version of code, check out the files section of the CakePHP project at CakeForge by going to http://cakeforge.org/projects/cakephp/.

To grab a nightly, download one from http://cakephp.org/downloads/index/nightly. These nightly releases are stable, and often include the bug fixes between stable releases.

To grab a fresh copy from our SVN repository, use your favorite SVN client and connect to https://svn.cakephp.org/repo/trunk/cake/ and choose the version you're after.

Unpacking

Now that you've downloaded the most recent release, place that compressed package on your web server in the webroot. Now you need to unpack the CakePHP package. There are two ways to do this, using a development setup, which allows you to easily view many CakePHP applications under a single domain, or using the production setup, which allows for a single CakePHP application on the domain.

Setting Up CakePHP

The first way to setup CakePHP is generally only recommended for development environments because it is less secure. The second way is considered more secure and should be used in a production environment.

NOTE: /app/tmp must be writable by the user that your web server runs as.

Development Setup

For development we can place the whole Cake installation directory inside the specified DocumentRoot like this:

/wwwroot
    /cake
        /app
        /cake
        /vendors
        .htaccess
        index.php

In this setup the wwwroot folder acts as the web root so your URLs will look something like this (if you're also using mod_rewrite):

www.example.com/cake/controllerName/actionName/param1/param2

Production Setup

In order to utilize a production setup, you will need to have the rights to change the DocumentRoot on your server. Doing so, makes the whole domain act as a single CakePHP application.

The production setup uses the following layout:

../path_to_cake_install
    /app
        /config
        /controllers
        /models
        /plugins
        /tmp
        /vendors
        /views
        /webroot <-- This should be your new DocumentRoot
        .htaccess
        index.php
    /cake
    /vendors
    .htaccess
    index.php

Suggested Production httpd.conf

DocumentRoot /path_to_cake/app/webroot

In this setup the webroot directory is acting as the web root so your URLs might look like this (if you're using mod_rewrite):

http://www.example.com/controllerName/actionName/param1/param2

Advanced Setup: Alternative Installation Options

There are some cases where you may wish to place Cake's directories on different places on disk. This may be due to a shared host restriction, or maybe you just want a few of your apps to share the same Cake libraries.

There are three main parts to a Cake application:

1. The core CakePHP libraries - Found in /cake

2. Your application code (e.g. controllers, models, layouts and views) - Found in /app

3. Your application webroot files (e.g. images, javascript and css) - Found in /app/webroot

Each of these directories can be located anywhere on your file system, with the exception of the webroot, which needs to be accessible by your web server. You can even move the webroot folder out of the app folder as long as you tell Cake where you've put it.

To configure your Cake installation, you'll need to make some changes to /app/webroot/index.php (as it is distributed in Cake). There are three constants that you'll need to edit: ROOT, APP_DIR, and CAKE_CORE_INCLUDE_PATH.

1. ROOT should be set to the path of the directory that contains your app folder.

2. APP_DIR should be set to the path of your app folder.

3. CAKE_CORE_INCLUDE_PATH should be set to the path of your Cake libraries folder.

An example might help illustrate this better. Imagine that I wanted to set up Cake to work with the following setup:

1. I want my Cake libraries shared with other applications, and placed in /usr/lib/cake.

2. My Cake webroot directory needs to be /var/www/mysite/.

3. My application files will be stored in /home/me/mysite.

Here's what the file setup looks like:

/home
    /me
        /mysite                  <-- Used to be /cake_install/app
            /config
            /controllers
            /models
            /plugins
            /tmp
            /vendors
            /views
            index.php
/var
    /www
        /mysite                  <-- Used to be /cake_install/app/webroot
            /css
            /files
            /img
            /js
            .htaccess
            css.php
            favicon.ico
            index.php
/usr
    /lib
        /cake                    <-- Used to be /cake_install/cake
            /cake
                /config
                /docs
                /libs
                /scripts
                app_controller.php
                app_model.php
                basics.php
                bootstrap.php
                dispatcher.php
            /vendors
 

Given this type of setup, I would need to edit my webroot index.php file (which should be at /var/www/mysite/index.php, in this example) to look like the following:

It is recommended to use the 'DS' constant rather than slashes to delimit file paths. This prevents any 'missing file' errors you might get as a result of using the wrong delimiter, and it makes your code more portable.

Configuring Apache and mod_rewrite

While CakePHP is built to work with mod_rewrite out of the box, 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:

1. Make sure that an .htaccess override is allowed: in your httpd.conf, you should have a section that defines a section for each Directory on your server. Make sure the AllowOverride is set to All for the correct Directory.

2. Make sure you are editing the system httpd.conf rather than a user- or site-specific httpd.conf.

3. For some reason or another, you might have obtained a copy of CakePHP without the needed .htaccess files. This sometimes happens because some operating systems treat files that start with '.' as hidden, and don't copy them. Make sure your copy of CakePHP is from the downloads section of the site or our SVN repository.

4. Make sure you are loading up mod_rewrite correctly! You should see something like LoadModule rewrite_module libexec/httpd/mod_rewrite.so and AddModule mod_rewrite.c in your httpd.conf.

5. If you are installing Cake into a user directory (http://example.com/~myusername/), you'll need to modify the .htaccess files in the base directory of your Cake installation, and in the app/webroot folder. Just add the line "RewriteBase /~myusername/".

6. If for some reason your URLS are suffixed with a long, annoying session ID (http://example.com/posts/?CAKEPHP=4kgj577sgabvnmhjgkdiuy1956if6ska), you might also add "php_flag session.trans_id off" to the .htaccess file at the root of your installation as well.

Make Sure It's Working

Alright, lets see this baby in action. Depending on which setup you used, you should point your browser to http://www.example.com or http://www.example.com/cake. 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 Cake-based application.