Lynda. Up and Running with PHP CodeIgniter / Section 2 - 3. Installing CodeIgniter

Installing CodeIgniter

CodeIgniter installation is really straight forward. I'm going to start by connecting to my local development server, SSH sandbox. Next, I'm going to change directory to a temporary directory. I prefer /var/tmp. I'm going to use wget to download the archive containing CodeIgniter. I'm using version 2.1.3. So, here's the current full path to that file. Http://ellislab.com/asset/ci_download_files/reactor/codeigniter _2.1.3.zip.

Now that the archive has been downloaded, extract it. I'm going to use unzip and then the name of the file. Now that the archive has been extracted, change directory to your web root. In my case, it's media/sf_sandbox. Make sure it's empty before preceding. Good, I've got a clean slate. Copy the extracted files to the web root. I'm going to recursively copy using CP -R, and the path for our temp, and then CodeIgniter.

And then the full contents of the directory to the current directory. Now that it's been copied, a little configuration is needed. I'm going to to switch to NetBeans. I'm going to create a new project with a PHP application with existing sources, that is located on my desktop in the sandbox folder. I will put NetBeans metadata into a separate directory and click Finish. I don't need index.php, the front controller, so, I'll just close it. All configuration files are contained in application config. First thing I'm going to configure is the database.

I'm going to scroll down a little bit, I'm going to set the user name, in my case, it'll be sandbox. The password, sandbox again, and the data base name which is sandbox. When complete, save and close the database configuration file. Finally, I'm going to configure an automatic connection to the database, which will automatically load and instantiate the database connection on every page load. To do that I'll use an auto loader. Navigate to auto load. I'm going to scroll downy to the bottom and down in libraries, I'm just going to add the string database and save. I'll define libraries in much greater detail later in the course. Save the changes, then close all open files.

To verify that the settings are working, switch to the browser. I'm going to navigate to my web server root, which in my case is http://sandbox.dev:8080. I see a welcome to Codeigniter message. Success, Codeigniter has been installed. If you see any errors, verify that your database credentials have been set up correctly. If there aren't any errors, then right now, this application isn't very useful, it's only showing a stock message. That's not very fun. Let's start by customizing Codeigniter to display something more useful than default text.