You can install Yii in two ways, using Composer or by downloading an archive file. The former is the preferred way, as it allows you to install new extensions or update Yii by simply running a single command.
Note: Unlike with Yii 1, standard installations of Yii 2 results in both the framework and an application skeleton being downloaded and installed.
If you do not already have Composer installed, you may do so by following the instructions at getcomposer.org. On Linux and Mac OS X, you'll run the following commands:
curl -s http://getcomposer.org/installer | php
mv composer.phar /usr/local/bin/composer
On Windows, you'll download and run Composer-Setup.exe.
Please refer to the Composer Documentation if you encounter any problems or want to learn more about Composer usage.
With Composer installed, you can install Yii by running the following command under a Web-accessible folder:
composer create-project --prefer-dist yiisoft/yii2-app-basic basic
The above command installs Yii as a directory named basic
.
Tip: If you want to install the latest development version of Yii, you may use the following command, which adds a stability option:
composer create-project --prefer-dist --stability=dev yiisoft/yii2-app-basic basic
Note that the development version of Yii should not be used for production as it may break your running code.
Installing Yii from an archive file involves two steps:
- Download the archive file from yiiframework.com.
- Unpack the downloaded file to a Web-accessible folder.
The above installation instructions show how to install Yii, which also creates a basic Web application that works out of the box. This approach is a good starting point for small projects, or for when you just start learning Yii.
But there are other installation options available:
- If you only want to install the core framework and would like to build an entire application from scratch, you may follow the instructions as explained in Building Application from Scratch.
- If you want to start with a more sophisticated application, better suited to team development environments, you may consider installing the Advanced Application Template.
After installation, you can use your browser to access the installed Yii application with the following URL:
http://localhost/basic/web/index.php
This URL assumes you have installed Yii in a directory named basic
, directly under the Web server's document root directory,
and that the Web server is running on your local machine(localhost
), you may have to adjust it to your installation environment.
You should see the above "Congratulations!" page in your browser. If not, please check if your PHP installation satisfies Yii's requirements. You can check if the minimum requirements are met using one of the following approaches:
-
Use a browser to access the URL
http://localhost/basic/requirements.php
-
Run the following commands:
cd basic php requirements.php
You should configure your PHP installation so that it meets the minimum requirements of Yii. Most importantly, you should have PHP 5.4 or above. You should also install
the PDO PHP Extension and a corresponding database driver
(such as pdo_mysql
for MySQL databases), if your application needs a database.
Info: You may skip this subsection for now if you are just test driving Yii with no intention of deploying it to a production server.
The application installed according to the above instructions should work out of box with either an Apache HTTP server or an Nginx HTTP server, on Windows, Mac OS X, or Linux.
On a production server, you may want to configure your Web server so that the application can be accessed
via the URL http://www.example.com/index.php
instead of http://www.example.com/basic/web/index.php
. Such configuration
requires pointing the document root of your Web server to the basic/web
folder. You may also
want to hide index.php
from the URL, as described in the URL Parsing and Generation section.
In this subsection, you'll learn how to configure your Apache or Nginx server to achieve these goals.
Info: By setting
basic/web
as the document root, you also prevent end users from accessing your private application code and sensitive data files that are stored in the sibling directories ofbasic/web
. Denying access to those other folders is a producent security improvement.
Info: If your application will run in a shared hosting environment where you do not have permission to modify its Web server configuration, you may still adjust the structure of your application for better security. Please refer to the Shared Hosting Environment section for more details.
Use the following configuration in Apache's httpd.conf
file or within a virtual host configuration. Note that you
should replace path/to/basic/web
with the actual path for basic/web
.
# Set document root to be "basic/web"
DocumentRoot "path/to/basic/web"
<Directory "path/to/basic/web">
RewriteEngine on
# If a directory or a file exists, use the request directly
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
# Otherwise forward the request to index.php
RewriteRule . index.php
# ...other settings...
</Directory>
You should have installed PHP as an FPM SAPI to use Nginx.
Use the following Nginx configuration, replacing path/to/basic/web
with the actual path for basic/web
and mysite.local
with
the actual hostname to serve.
server {
charset utf-8;
client_max_body_size 128M;
listen 80; ## listen for ipv4
#listen [::]:80 default_server ipv6only=on; ## listen for ipv6
server_name mysite.local;
root /path/to/basic/web;
index index.php;
access_log /path/to/basic/log/access.log main;
error_log /path/to/basic/log/error.log;
location / {
# Redirect everything that isn't a real file to index.php
try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php?$args;
}
# uncomment to avoid processing of calls to non-existing static files by Yii
#location ~ \.(js|css|png|jpg|gif|swf|ico|pdf|mov|fla|zip|rar)$ {
# try_files $uri =404;
#}
#error_page 404 /404.html;
location ~ \.php$ {
include fastcgi.conf;
fastcgi_pass 127.0.0.1:9000;
#fastcgi_pass unix:/var/run/php5-fpm.sock;
}
location ~ /\.(ht|svn|git) {
deny all;
}
}
When using this configuration, you should also set cgi.fix_pathinfo=0
in the php.ini
file
in order to avoid many unnecessary system stat()
calls.
Also note that when running an HTTPS server, you need to add fastcgi_param HTTPS on;
so that Yii
can properly detect if a connection is secure.