In this tutorial, you will learn:
How to Download and Install CodeIgniter Framework
What is Composer in CodeIgniter?
How to Download & Install Composer
CodeIgniter Config Files
CodeIgniter Configurations
How to remove index.php in CodeIgniter
How to Download and Install 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) Download CodeIgniter Framework. 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) Unzip CodeIgniter-4.1.4.zip file. Clicking the above link will download the framework as a zipped folder and Unzip the contents of CodeIgniter-4.1.4.zip Step 3) Create a new directory. 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 on your development drive, e.g, D:\Sites\online-store Step 4) Open the contents of CodeIgniter-4.1.4. Now, 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) Open the terminal and Run the following command. Start the built-in PHP server, just to make sure everything is OK. Run the following command Step 6) Open the below URL. Load the following URL into your browser. http://localhost:3000/
If you see above image, all is working well,
CodeIgniter Config Files
Now that we have successfully installed CodeIgniter let’s look at the configuration directory The following image shows how the Composer works in CodeIgniter: 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;
Install individual packages such as third-party email or database library Update existing packages Remove installed packages
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 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 HERE,
composer create-project CodeIgniter/framework online-store composer invokes the composer program, create-project downloads the specified project framework which is in the namespace CodeIgniter.
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. The configuration directory is located in
HERE,
autoload.php – specifies the helpers, libraries, drivers, packages, etc that should be loaded when the application starts config.php – contains application configurations such as base url, language, query strings, etc. constants.php – as the name suggests, this file I used to define application constants database.php – contains database connection parameters doctypes.php – defines document types i.e. html4, html5, sv10 etc foreign_chars.php – defines foreign characters that are to say characters that are found in languages such as Russian and others hooks.php – allows you to define your own hooks memcached.php – if you are using CodeIgniter together with Memcached then you can use this file for configurations. migration.php – if you want to use database migrations in CodeIgniter then you can use this file to config the settings. mimes.php – contains file mime types profile.php – contains settings that are used by the built-in CodeIgniter compiler routes.php – contains the application routes smileys.php – contains settings for smileys user_agents.php – contains settings for browser user agents, i.e., Chrome, Opera, Firefox, etc.
CodeIgniter Configurations
Let’s now make some of the most common settings in CodeIgniter:
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 HERE,
$config[‘base_url’] = ‘http://localhost:3000’; sets the base URL to localhost running on port 3000.
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
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
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. They all go through index.php. by default, index.php is shown in the URL as shown in the example below 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: HERE,
We are using mod_rewrite to remove the page so as per requirement, this should be set to blank.
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: HERE,
The above code is for configuring web servers that run apache server. The above code basically gets the URI parameters and executes them via index.php even if it’s not showing in the browser URL.
Summary
They are two ways of installation CodeIgniter. You can download the latest version from the CodeIgniter website, or you can use composer to automate the installation. The composer is a package management system for PHP. A composer can be used for: Install individual packages, Update existing packages remove installed packages.
