Creating Yii applications with composer ¶

1. Prepare Application
2. Extend Your Application
3. More…

When creating web-application projects, you can add a great variety of different extensions, modules, plugins or scripts to your code-base. But maintaining a stable combination and updating certain packages can become a hard task.

Luckily there are tools to handle the dependency management for you, like composer - which will be the package manager for Yii 2 - but this tutorial shows the integration of composer with Yii 1.1.

Prepare Application ¶

Before you start creating our Yii application with composer you have to do some preparation:

• download composer
• create composer.json file
• create a class to handle composer callbacks
• create config/console.php

While some of the details are described in the following paragraphs, you can download the example source-code from Phundament 3 yii-webapp branch.

Composer Setup ¶

Before using composer to retrieve packages for your application you have to adjust some values in composer.json.

Repository ¶

Since Yii is not available via the standard packagist repository yet, disable the packagist repo for now and use the Phundament package repository, which has Yii framework and other Yii extensions available as a package.

"repositories": [
{
    "packagist": false
},{
    "type":"composer",
    "url": "http://packages.phundament.com"
}
],

Packages ¶

If you want to create a basic Yii web application i.e., just add yiisoft/yii to your requirements.

"require": {
    "php": ">=5.3.2",
    "yiisoft/yii": "1.1.*",
    "yiiext/migrate-command": "0.7.1.1"
},

Note: because you'll have to manage migrations in different locations later on, also add the extension migrate-command.

Callbacks ¶

You can use composer scripts to invoke Yii commands, first add some script hooks and an autoloading section for the callback class to composer.json.

"autoload": {
    "psr-0": {
        "config": "./"
    }
},
"scripts": {
    "pre-install-cmd": "config\\ComposerCallback::preInstall",
    "post-install-cmd": "config\\ComposerCallback::postInstall",
    "pre-update-cmd": "config\\ComposerCallback::preUpdate",
    "post-update-cmd": "config\\ComposerCallback::postUpdate",
    "post-package-install": ["config\\ComposerCallback::postPackageInstall"],
    "post-package-update": ["config\\ComposerCallback::postPackageUpdate"]
}

Hooks can be configured in config/console.php as a parameter composer.callbacks. For details about the callback class, see its source-code.

Yii Configuration ¶

Now register specific callbacks, i.e. for Yii register a callback by the naming schema [vendor]/[package]-[action], which triggers the creation of a standard web application skeleton.

'params' => array(
    'composer.callbacks' => array(
        // args for Yii command runner
        'yiisoft/yii-install' => array('yiic', 'webapp', dirname(__FILE__).DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR.'..'.DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR.'..'),
        'post-update' => array('yiic', 'migrate'),
        'post-install' => array('yiic', 'migrate'),
    ),
),

Note: There are callbacks for post-processing an update or install command. In this case, we've already registered the extended migrate command to run after install or update.

Now you're good to go and can start the installation with

php composer.phar install

Composer will now fetch the packages from composer.json and because you've registered a callback for yiisoft/yii-install it will not only download the code, but also invoke yiic and create a standard web application skeleton at the given location.

Extend Your Application ¶

With the Phundament package repository you can already find some more ready to use extensions for your app. As an example you can add the popular yii-user extension.

To install an extension configure the extension first.

Configure ¶

Adjust your configuration config/main.php and config/console.php according to the README instructions.

Add the module,

'modules'=>array(
    'user'=>array(
        'class' => 'application.vendor.mishamx.yii-user.UserModule',
    ),
),

update the database component (needed by yii-user)

'db'=>array(
	'tablePrefix' => 'app_',
),

an update the migrate command (console.php only).

'commandMap' => array(
    'migrate' => array(
        'modulePaths' => array(
            'user' => 'application.vendor.mishamx.yii-user.migrations',
        ),
    )
)	

Require ¶

Now you can add the package to your application with

php composer.phar require mishamx/yii-user

After the install process composer will trigger the post-install callback which now invokes the needed database migrations.

You can now use the module here http://yii-webapp/index.php?r=user

More… ¶

Have a look at Phundament 3 (master branch) for a Yii application with preconfigured modules for user, rights and media-management and add your own packages to packages.phundament.com.

Give feedback and join the development!