How to Install CakePHP 3.8 on Fedora 30/29/28

Written by Rahul, Updated on July 31, 2019

CakePHP is a popular PHP framework used for the web development. It is fast and easy to install. Recently CakePHP has released its latest version 3.8 with a variety of changes to improve speed and security. This article will help you to install CakePHP 3.8 (or latest version) on Fedora 30/29/28/27/25 system.

Step 1 – Prerequsities

First of all, you need to set up a LAMP environment to install CakePHP on your Red Hat system. We assume that you already have PHP, MySQL and Apache installed on your system. If you don’t have, use the following article to install it.

Install Apache, PHP, & MySQL on Fedora

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 Fedora 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 RedHat based system Apache default uses apache as the user. So change files ownership as per your setup.

chown -R apache:apache 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.

mysql> CREATE DATABASE CakePHPDB;
mysql> GRANT ALL ON CakePHPDB.* to 'dbuser'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY '_password_';
mysql> FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
mysql> quit

mysql> CREATE DATABASE CakePHPDB;

mysql> GRANT ALL ON CakePHPDB.* to 'dbuser'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY '_password_';

mysql> FLUSH PRIVILEGES;

mysql> quit

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

File: config/app.php

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

Here, you have two options to run your CakePHP application. For the development, system follows 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 on localhost at port 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.

sudo vi /etc/httpd/conf.d/cakephp.conf

File content: /etc/httpd/conf.d/cakephp.conf

<VirtualHost *:80>
    ServerAdmin [email protected]
    ServerName cakephp.example.com
    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. Then restart Apache service

sudo systemctl restart httpd

Now access your CakePHP application in a web browser.

http://cakephp.example.com