1. Intro
2. Prerequisities
3. Yii demo app + GitLab
4. User management + basic SQL commands
5. Login via database + Session
6. Access rights

Please give me a few days to add whole text

Intro ¶

Skip this paragraph if you are in hurry :-) ... 8 years ago I started these two tutorials for Yii 1:

• https://www.yiiframework.com/wiki/250/yii-for-beginners
• https://www.yiiframework.com/wiki/462/yii-for-beginners-2

... and today I am beginning with Yii 2 so I will also gather my snippets and publish them here so we all can quickly setup the yii-basic-demo.

I have some experiences with Yii 1, but I havent used Yii for almost 5 years so many things are new for me again. Plus I was suprised that the Yii 2 demo application does not contain some basic functionalities (like DB login, translations etc) which must be implemented in the most of web projects so I will focus on them. Plus I will talk about GitLab.

Prerequisities ¶

Skip this paragraph if you know how to run your Yii demo project...

I work with Win10 + XAMPP Server so I will expect this configuration. Do not forget to start the server and enable Apache + MySQL in the dialog. Then test that following 2 URLs work for you

• http://localhost/
• http://localhost/phpmyadmin/

You should also download the Yii basic demo application and place it into the htdocs folder. In my case it is here:

• C:\xampp\htdocs

And your index.php should be here:

• C:\xampp\htdocs\basic\web\index.php

If you set thing correcly up, following URL will open your demo application. Now it will probably throw an exception:

• http://localhost/basic/web/

The Exception is removed by enterinng any text into attribute 'cookieValidationKey' in file:

• C:\xampp\htdocs\basic\config\web.php

Dont forget to connect Yii to the DB. It is done in file:

• C:\xampp\htdocs\basic\config\db.php

... but it should work out of the box if you use DB name "yii2basic" which is used below ...

Yii demo app + GitLab ¶

... text ...

User management + basic SQL commands ¶

To create DB with users, use following command. I recommend charset utf8_unicode_ci (or utf8mb4_unicode_ci) as it allows you to use more international characters.

CREATE DATABASE IF NOT EXISTS `yii2basic` DEFAULT CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_unicode_ci;

CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS `user` (
  `id` INT NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
  `username` VARCHAR(45) NOT NULL,
  `password` VARCHAR(60) NOT NULL,
  `email`    VARCHAR(60) NOT NULL,
  `authKey`  VARCHAR(60),
  PRIMARY KEY (`id`))
ENGINE = InnoDB;

INSERT INTO `user` (`id`, `username`, `password`, `authKey`) VALUES (NULL, 'user01', '0497fe4d674fe37194a6fcb08913e596ef6a307f', NULL);

If you must use MyISAM instead of InnoDB, just change the word InnoDB into MYISAM.

Then use GII to generate model, views and controller. The GII URL will probably be

• http://localhost/basic/web/index.php?r=gii.
• When creating the model, check this checkbox: Enable I18N ... we will need i18n later
• Note that there already is a model named User in the demo app. You will not need it if you want to use login-via-DB so feel free to check "Overwrite" in GII. The newly created User model will now be usable only for table operations, not for login. But we will enhance it, keep reading.
• The new model will only have 3 methods: tableName(), rules(), attributeLabels()
• In order to use the DB for login, we need to implement IdentityInterface which requires 5 new methods. But as I do not need all those methods, in some of them I have commented out their body in the example below.

The final model should look like this:

<?php

namespace app\models;

use Yii;

class User extends \yii\db\ActiveRecord implements \yii\web\IdentityInterface {

    // When user detail is being edited we will only modify attribute password_new
    // Why? We dont want to load password-hash from DB and display it to the user
    // We only want him to see empty field and if it is filled in, password is changed on background
    public $password_new;
    public $password_new_repeat;

    // ----- Default 3 model-methods by GII:
    
    public static function tableName() {
        return 'user';
    }

    public function rules() {
        return [
            [['username', 'email'], 'required'],
            [['username', 'email'], 'string', 'max' => 45],
            ['email', 'email'],
            [['password', 'authKey'], 'string', 'max' => 60],
            [['password_new_repeat', 'password_new'], 'safe'],
            ['password_new_repeat', 'compare', 'operator' => '==', 'compareAttribute' => 'password_new'],
            ['password', 'setPasswordWhenChanged'],
        ];
    }

    public function attributeLabels() {
        return [
            'id' => Yii::t('app', 'ID'),
            'username' => Yii::t('app', 'Username'),
            'password' => Yii::t('app', 'Password'),
            'password_new' => Yii::t('app', 'New password'),
            'password_new_repeat' => Yii::t('app', 'Repeat new password'),
            'authKey' => Yii::t('app', 'Auth Key'),
            'email' => Yii::t('app', 'Email'),
        ];
    }

    // ----- Password validator
    
    public function setPasswordWhenChanged($attribute_name, $params) {
        
        if (trim($this->password_new_repeat) === "") {
            return true;
        }
        
        if ($this->password_new_repeat === $this->password_new) {
            $this->password = sha1($this->password_new_repeat);
        }
        
        return true;
    }
    
    // ----- IdentityInterface methods:

    public static function findIdentity($id) {
        return static::findOne($id);
    }

    public static function findIdentityByAccessToken($token, $type = null) {
        return static::findOne(['access_token' => $token]);
    }

    public function getId() {
        return $this->id;
    }

    public function getAuthKey() {
        return $this->authKey;
    }

    public function validateAuthKey($authKey) {
        return $this->authKey === $authKey;
    }

    // ----- Because of default LoginForm:

    public static function findByUsername($username) {
        return static::findOne(['username' => $username]);
    }

    public function validatePassword($password) {
        return $this->password === sha1($password);
    }

}

Login via database + Session ¶

... text ...

Access rights ¶

... text ...