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CakePHP: the basics

· by admin · Read in about 3 min · (517 Words)
cakephp php

CakePHP is a PHP framework to easily build MVC applications. To install it clone the repository on GitHub

git clone https://github.com/cakephp/cakephp.git cakephp-2.2.1
git checkout 2.2.1

Now we can use the Cake code generator from command line - it’s called bake and is run like cake bake. The path to the cake executable (really a tiny shell script which invokes the real PHP-cli one) is like cake-2.2.1/lib/Cake/Console/cake. For convenience, you can add this to your PATH. We are now ready to generate the skeleton of the directory structure plus common files required by a CakePHP application:

cake bake

Bake will ask you the path of the project, the credentials for accessing the database and so on. You can keep the default for the majority of the settings. Let’s see what files/directory bake just created:

myapp/
myapp/.htaccess
myapp/Locale
myapp/Locale/eng
myapp/Locale/eng/LC_MESSAGES
myapp/Lib
myapp/Console
myapp/Console/cake.bat
myapp/Console/Command
myapp/Console/Command/AppShell.php
myapp/Console/Command/Task
myapp/Console/cake.php
myapp/Console/cake
myapp/Console/Templates
myapp/index.php
myapp/Plugin
myapp/tmp
myapp/tmp/cache
myapp/tmp/cache/models
myapp/tmp/cache/persistent
myapp/tmp/cache/persistent/myapp_cake_core_cake_console_
myapp/tmp/cache/views
myapp/tmp/logs
myapp/tmp/tests
myapp/tmp/sessions
myapp/Vendor
myapp/Model
myapp/Model/AppModel.php
myapp/Model/Datasource
myapp/Model/Behavior
myapp/Controller
myapp/Controller/Component
myapp/Controller/AppController.php
myapp/Controller/PagesController.php
myapp/Config
myapp/Config/email.php.default
myapp/Config/routes.php
myapp/Config/acl.ini.php
myapp/Config/database.php.default
myapp/Config/bootstrap.php
myapp/Config/core.php
myapp/Config/database.php
myapp/Config/Schema
myapp/Config/Schema/sessions.sql
myapp/Config/Schema/sessions.php
myapp/Config/Schema/db_acl.php
myapp/Config/Schema/db_acl.sql
myapp/Config/Schema/i18n.sql
myapp/Config/Schema/i18n.php
myapp/webroot
myapp/webroot/img
myapp/webroot/img/test-fail-icon.png
myapp/webroot/img/cake.icon.png
myapp/webroot/img/test-pass-icon.png
myapp/webroot/img/cake.power.gif
myapp/webroot/img/test-skip-icon.png
myapp/webroot/img/test-error-icon.png
myapp/webroot/.htaccess
myapp/webroot/index.php
myapp/webroot/css
myapp/webroot/css/cake.generic.css
myapp/webroot/test.php
myapp/webroot/js
myapp/webroot/files
myapp/webroot/favicon.ico
myapp/Test
myapp/Test/Fixture
myapp/Test/Case
myapp/Test/Case/Model
myapp/Test/Case/Model/Behavior
myapp/Test/Case/Controller
myapp/Test/Case/Controller/Component<cod
myapp/Test/Case/View
myapp/Test/Case/View/Helper
myapp/View
myapp/View/Elements
myapp/View/Emails
myapp/View/Emails/text
myapp/View/Emails/text/default.ctp
myapp/View/Emails/html
myapp/View/Emails/html/default.ctp
myapp/View/Scaffolds
myapp/View/Helper
myapp/View/Helper/AppHelper.php
myapp/View/Errors
myapp/View/Errors/error500.ctp
myapp/View/Errors/error400.ctp
myapp/View/Pages
myapp/View/Pages/home.ctp
myapp/View/Layouts
myapp/View/Layouts/error.ctp
myapp/View/Layouts/ajax.ctp
myapp/View/Layouts/Emails
myapp/View/Layouts/Emails/text
myapp/View/Layouts/Emails/text/default.ctp
myapp/View/Layouts/Emails/html
myapp/View/Layouts/Emails/html/default.ctp
myapp/View/Layouts/xml
myapp/View/Layouts/xml/default.ctp
myapp/View/Layouts/js
myapp/View/Layouts/js/default.ctp
myapp/View/Layouts/rss
myapp/View/Layouts/rss/default.ctp
myapp/View/Layouts/flash.ctp
myapp/View/Layouts/default.ctp

Now, enable mod_rewrite on your Apache webserver (or the equivalent) and point a browser to http://localhost/myapp. You will see an error asking you to set the value for the Cake library files under the constant CAKE_CORE_INCLUDE_PATH in webroot/index.php. Before setting this, it’s time to init the git repository for our new project:

git init
find . -empty -type d -not -iwholename '*/.git/*' -exec touch '{}'/EMPTY \;
touch README.md
git add .
git commit -m "Initial commit"
git remote add origin $URL
git push -u origin master

(Note that the find on line 2 is there to preserve the directory structure in git). Now it’s time to configure the cake path seen above, but we don’t want to put the edit in Git. Finally, we’ll add a .gitignore with the tmp/ directory as the only content

git update-index --assume-unchanged webroot/index.php
# uncomment around line 60 in the file
echo "tmp/" >> .gitignore
git add .gitignore
git commit -m "Added .gitignore"

It’s time to see out app in a browser window What can be seen here is a View rendered by the PagesController. Here is the flow

  1. The browser issues a HTTP GET /myapp/

  2. Cake reads its routing table (defined in Config/routes.php) and finds the line matching /

  3. PagesController invokes its  display method

These are the main components when dealing a Cake app: first you write a Controller and its associated View, then you declare a route and finally define the DB part: database + Model (in the case of the PagesController, it really doesn’t store contents in a db, but access raw files stored under View/Page/

In the next post, we’ll enhance the PagesController by adding authentication and database storage

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