How to Download & Install CodeIgniter + Composer [Configuration Included]

Details

In this tutorial, we are going to look at how you can install and configure CodeIgniter. They are two ways of installation CodeIgniter. You can download the latest version from the CodeIgniter website, or you can use a tool like a composer to automate the installation

In this tutorial, you will learn:

Download and Install Latest CodeIgniter Framework

The source code for the CodeIgniter framework is available on the official CodeIgniter website. If you want to download the latest version of the framework, then you should do it from the official web page.

Step 1) Open the following URL in your browser https://codeigniter.com/

The image below shows the download link to the latest version of the framework

Step 2) Clicking the above link will download the framework as a zipped folder. Unzip the contents of CodeIgniter-3.1.10.zip

Step 3) Let's say you want to create a project called the online store. You can follow the following steps to start your project. Create a new directory in on your development drive, e.g, D:\Sites\online-store

Step 4) Open the contents of CodeIgniter-3.1.10, you should be able to see the following files

Copy the above contents to your project directory, e.g., D:\Sites\online-store

Step 5) Just to make sure everything is ok, open the terminal and start the built-in PHP server 

cd D:\Sites\ online-store

Run the following command 

php -S localhost:3000

load the following URL into your browser

http://localhost:3000/

If you see above image, all is working well,

What is Composer?

The composer is a package management system for PHP. A package is simply a collection of PHP scripts that work together towards a single goal. Based on this definition, CodeIgniter can even though it's a framework, qualifies to be labeled a package in composer terminologies.

The following image shows how the composer works

The author of CodeIgniter hosts the package at Packagist which is a central repository for PHP packages, etc.

When the developer runs the composer command to download CodeIgniter, Composer communicates with Packagist and downloads the latest release of the package. In addition to installing frameworks such as CodeIgniter, Composer can also be used to;

How to install Composer

Step 1) Load the following URL in your browser https://getcomposer.org/download/

Download the setup and follow the installation instructions.

Step 2) Open the command prompt/terminal

Run the following command 

composer

You will see the following results

If you can see the above results, then congratulations, you have successfully installed the composer.

Let's now create a new project called online-store

Run the following command 

composer create-project CodeIgniter/framework online-store

HERE,

You should be able to see results that is similar to the following

If you are a big fan of commands on the terminal then this is the way to go otherwise you can use the good old fashioned download the zipped file, unzip and happy coding.

CodeIgniter Config Files

Now that we have successfully installed CodeIgniter let's look at the configuration directory

The configuration directory is located in 

application/config

HERE,

CodeIgniter Configurations

let's now make some of the most common settings in CodeIgniter 

Open application/config/config.php

Base URL 

$config['base_url'] = '';

Sets the base URL. If its blank then CodeIgniter will set it for you automatically. If you want to be explicit about your base URL, then you can use the something like the following 

$config['base_url'] = 'http://localhost:3000';

HERE,

Class Prefix

CodeIgniter uses the prefix CI_Classname. As a best practice and to avoid collisions with internal classes, you can prefix your class, i.e., MY_Classname. The following line is used to set your class prefix

$config['subclass_prefix'] = 'MY_';

Query Strings

These are parameters that are visited in the URL, i.e., example.com/index.php?q=eggs. If you would like to use such URLs, then you will have to set 

$config['enable_query_strings'] = FALSE;
To
$config['enable_query_strings'] = TRUE;

Other settings

They are many settings that you can set in config.php including date formats, cache and view paths, etc. much of what you configure depends on your application needs

How to remove index.php in CodeIgniter

CodeIgniter is an MVC framework. This means it has a single entry point into the application which is index.php. It doesn't matter what URL you access. The all go through index.php. by default, index.php is shown in the URL as shown in the example below 

example.com/index.php?q=eggs

The URL looks longer and weird. The good thing is you can configure CodeIgniter to remove that.

Open application/config/config.php

Locate the following line 

$config['index_page'] = 'index.php';
Set it to the following
$config['index_page'] = '';

HERE,

Next, we need to create the .htaccess that rewrites the URLs

Add a new file .htacces in the root directory of the application

Add the following code 

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond $1 !^(index\.php|resources|robots\.txt)
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index.php/$1 [L,QSA]

HERE,

Summary

 

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