Install CakePHP 3 On Ubuntu 16.04

This guide assumes you’ve set up a Ubuntu 14.04 server and have MYSQL up and running. This guide uses the “PHPMyAdmin” from the “One Click Apps” available on Digital Ocean running on a vps running Ubuntu 16.04. The smallest memory (512mb) should be enough to get you up and running.

If you don’t have a Digital Ocean account (you should, they’re a great service) get one here.

Step 1: Update Package Manager

ssh root@YOUR-IP

Note: If this is the first time you’ve logged into your vps, you will be asked to change the password from the one emailed to you when you created your vps. This is fairly self explanatory, simply follow the prompts.

Update your package manager:

sudo apt-get update

Step 2: Install Some PHP Modules

We need to install a few PHP modules that CakePHP uses. Namely the curl, zip, intl and sqlite modules.

Run these commands in succession. You may be asked if you want to take up the extra space, reply ‘Y’ for yes:

sudo apt-get install curl php7.0-cli git
sudo apt-get install php7.0-zip
sudo apt-get install php7.0-sqlite
sudo apt-get install php7.0-intl

Step 3: Install Composer

Composer is a dependancy manager for PHP, this is ultimately what we’ll use to install CakePHP to our server:

apt install composer

Step 4: Enable Rewrite Module

Make sure the recite module is enabled:

sudo a2enmod rewrite

Step 5: Restart Apache

For all the changes we’ve made to actually take affect, we need to restart our server:

service apache2 restart

Step 6: Enable AllowOverride

Navigate to the ‘/etc/apache2’ directory, download and open the ‘apache2.conf’ file. Around line 166 within the ‘<Directory /var/www/>’ tags, change the that says ‘AllowOverride None’ to:

AllowOverride All
 
This allows .htaccess files to override of the Apache config on a per directory basis, which is what CakePHP needs.

You’ll also need to restart apache again for this change to take affect:

service apache2 restart

Step 7: Install CakePHP

cd /var/www/html   Note: Change YOUR_APP_NAME to something applicable (no spaces):

composer create-project --prefer-dist cakephp/app YOUR_APP_NAME

Step 8: Update The Web Root For Your vps

At the moment when we visit our vps via a browser, we are taken to the ‘html’ folder (currently displays the default apache page). If you look in the folder you created in the previous step, there is a ‘webroot’ folder. This is actually the folder we need to point our vps to. We can do this in one of the apache config files.

Navigate to the ‘/etc/apache2/sites-enabled’ directory and download and open the ‘000-default.conf’ file. You need to just change one line (around line 12):

DocumentRoot /var/www/html/YOUR_APP_NAME/webroot
 
Note: Again, change YOUR_APP_NAME to whatever you used in the previous step.

Re-upload this from whence it came overwriting the old file. Finally give apache one last restart for that to take affect:

service apache2 restart
 
Done!

If you visit your vps IP in a browser, all being well, you should now see the default CakePHP.

You should see an abundance of green under ‘Environment’, ‘Filesystem’ and ‘DebugKit’. The ‘Database’ will show an error as we haven’t set one up yet and edited the CakePHP config file to tell it where to look for our database. You’ll need to setup a database and then edit your config.php file details can be found on how to do that in the CakePHP documentation here.

Note
As we’re running our cake setup and developing on a server as opposed to a local environment, we’ve uploaded the cake shell script used to generate the scaffolding code for our database. This lives in the ‘bin’ directory. You’ll need to give this file write and execute permissions:

cd /var/www/html/YOUR_APP_NAME/bin
sudo chmod 777 cake