How to Install CakePHP on Debian 9 (Stretch)

CakePHP is a PHP framework for rapid development of web application. Recently CakePHP has released its latest version 3.6 with a variety of changes to improve speed and security. This article will help you to Setup CakePHP 3.6 (or latest version) on Debian 9 (Stretch) Linux system.

Requirements:-

• PHP 5.5.9 or greater (including PHP 7).
• PHP mbstring extension
• PHP intl extension
• MySQL (5.1.10 or greater)

Step 1 – Install LAMP Server

You can skip this step for the system having LAMP setup already. If you don’t have LAMP installed on your system proceed with the following commands to Setup LAMP on your Linux Server.

sudo apt update
sudo apt install curl apache2 mysql-server libapache2-mod-php
sudo apt install php php-mysql php-mbstring php-intl php-xml 

Step 2 – Install Composer

Now CakePHP is using composer for managing dependencies. So first we need to install Composer using following command on the system. If already installed then just update to latest version.

Install Composer:

curl -sS https://getcomposer.org/installer | php
mv composer.phar /usr/local/bin/composer
chmod +x /usr/local/bin/composer

Update Composer:

composer self-update

Step 3 – Create CakePHP 3 Application

After installing the composer on your system. Let’s create CakePHP application named “MyApp” using composer command as below.

composer create-project --prefer-dist cakephp/app MyApp

Now set the proper permission for your project files. For Debian based system Apache default uses www-data as the user. So change files ownership as per your setup.

chown -R www-data:www-data MyApp
chmod -R 755 MyApp
chmod -R 777 MyApp/tmp

Step 4 – Setup Database for CakePHP

For this article, we are using MySQL as the database server. First use following commands to create a MySQL database and create.

Now edit config/app.php configuration file and search for your database setting. Make necessary changes as per below details

    'Datasources' => [
        'default' => [
            'className' => 'Cake\Database\Connection',
            'driver' => 'Cake\DatabaseDriver\Mysql',
            'persistent' => false,
            'host' => 'localhost',
            //'port' => 'nonstandard_port_number',
            'username' => 'myuser',
            'password' => '_password_',
            'database' => 'mydb',
            'encoding' => 'utf8',
            'timezone' => 'UTC',
            'cacheMetadata' => true,

Here, you have two options to run your CakePHP application. For development system follow the Step 5(A) and for Production deployment follow step 5(B).

Step 5(A) – Deploy CakePHP on Development System

First is to use its built-in web server preferred for development purpose installation. This will make your application available at http://host:port. From the app directory, execute:

bin/cake server

By default, without any arguments provided, this will serve your application at http://localhost:8765/.

You can also specify your own host and port like below

bin/cake server -H 192.168.10.123 -p 1234

This will serve your application at http://192.168.10.123:1234/

Step 5(B) – Deploy CakePHP on Production System

Second is deploy with external web servers like Apache its preferred for production use. Let’s create an Apache VirtualHost configuration file using the following content.

<VirtualHost *:80>
    ServerAdmin [email protected]
    ServerName cakephp.tecadmin.net
    DocumentRoot /var/www/html/MyApp/webroot
    <Directory /var/www/html/MyApp>
          Allowoverride All
    </Directory>
</VirtualHost>

Change the ServerName and document root as per your setup. After that reload your Apache service and access your CakePHP like http://cakephp.example.com.