How I start a new CodeIgniter Project

Every other day, I develop new websites from scratch for various clients and sometimes for some of my own projects. Unless the project is really complex, I prefer to develop in CodeIgniter, a super-flexible (MVC) PHP framework which lets me develop super-quick !

It is thus wise to have a standard pattern to follow each time I start a new project. This is what I do -

1. First, the usuals -

• Navigate to Apache’s Document root
• wget latest stable release of CodeIgniter (http://codeigniter.com/download.php)
• Extract
• rename it to MyProjectFolder/

2. Making http://www.myProject.com point to MyProjectFolder -

• Edit the /private/etc/hosts file, add these lines -

# XYZ Project
127.0.0.1 www.MyProject.com
127.0.0.1 MyProject.com

•  Edit the .htaccess file in Apache DocumentRoot, add these lines -

# for http://www.MyProject.com
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^(www\.)?MyProject\.com$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/MyProjectFolder
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /MyProjectFolder/$1 [L]

2. Navigate into MyProject and,

• Delete user-guide (un-necessary clutter since it is available online anyway)
• Add readme.md (short project description)

3.  Create a folder named static/ within MyProject. This will include all the stylesheets, images, fonts, javascripts etc.

4. Create a .htaccess file within MyProjectFolder/

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

This will enable serving static content and also enable clean URLs.

(www.MyProject.com/welcome instead of http://www.MyProject.com/index.php/welcome)

5. Create 3 folders within application/config/ -

• development
• testing
• production

Make sure that ‘ENVIRONMENT’ is set to ‘development’ in MyProjectFolder/index.php

Copy database.php and config.php inside these folders and delete the original one. Then, inside the development folder, setup the development environment -

•  Create a mysql database for the project and make changes in config/development/databases.php accordingly
• Create a folder db_scripts inside config folder and keep a record of all sql queries (create table scripts) executed on the database inside this folder.
• Set base_url, encryption key, index_page etc. in config/development/config.php and
  • $config['base_url'] = ‘http://www.MyProject.com/’;
  • $config['index_page'] = ”;
  • $config['encryption_key'] = ‘xxxRandomxxx’;

6. Edit config/routes.php file, set default controller to home (or whatever you wish)

7. Setup logging – Use third party library ci_log4php (This integrates Log4PHP with CodeIgniter)

• Refer my blogpost here for instructions on how to set it up

9. Setup Email (Optional) - Use the default Email helper for internal error-mails, notifications etc. and setup Sendgrid for emails sent to users. (I ll probably cover this in detail in another post)

• UPDATE : Here is the post.

10. Setup Auth – Use a third party library tank_auth [Download]

• Just follow the above link to download tank_auth and simply replace or add all the files and folders it contains.
• The config file is well documented and its easy to customize with a lot of options to set up a logging system exactly as you need

11. Push code to git

• Create a new repo on git and get the url git://github.com/youruser/somename.git
• Create the .gitignore file and select the codeigniter template
• Locally, at the root directory of your source, git init
• git remote add origin <URL From Step 1>
• git pull origin master
• git add .
• git commit -m “First commit”
• git push origin master

Typically the entire process should take around 30-40 minutes :)

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Tags: code-igniter, codeigniter, getting started, php, tutorial