URL Management

The concept of URL management in Yii fairly simple. The idea is that application uses internal routes and parameters everywhere. Framework takes care of translating routes into URLs and back according to URL manager configuration. This approach allows you to adjust URLs in a single config file without touching application code.

Internal route

Internal routes and parameters are what you're dealing with when implementing an application using Yii.

Each controller and its action has a corresponding internal route such as site/index. Here site is referred to as controller ID while index is referred to as action ID. If controller belongs to a module, internal route is prefixed with the module ID such as blog/post/index for a blog module.

Creating URLs

As was already mentioned, the most important rule is to always use URL manager to create URLs. Url manages is an application component with urlManager id that is accessible both from web and console applications via \Yii::$app->urlManager and has two following URL creation methods available:

createUrl($route, $params = [])
createAbsoluteUrl($route, $params = [])

First one creates URL relative to the application root while the second one creates URL prefixed with protocol and hostname. The former is suitable for internal application URLs while the latter is used when you need to create rules for outside the website. For example, when sending emails or generating RSS feed.

Some examples:

echo \Yii::$app->urlManager->createUrl('site/page', ['id' => 'about']);
echo \Yii::$app->urlManager->createAbsoluteUrl('blog/post/index');

Inside web application controller you can use its own createUrl shortcut method in the following forms:

echo $this->createUrl(''); // currently active route
echo $this->createUrl('view', ['id' => 'contact']); // same controller, different action
echo $this->createUrl('post/index'); // same module, different controller and action
echo $this->createUrl('/site/index'); // absolute route no matter which controller we're in

Tip: In order to generate URL with a hashtag, for example /index.php?r=site/page&id=100#title, you need to specify parameter named # using $this->createUrl('post/read', ['id' => 100, '#' => 'title']).

Customizing URLs

By default Yii uses a query string format URLs such as /index.php?r=news/view&id=100. In order to make URLs human-friendly you need to configure urlManager component like the following:

<?php
return [
	// ...
	'components' => [
		'urlManager' => [
			'enablePrettyUrl' => true,
			'showScriptName' => false,
		],
	],
];

Note that

Named parameters

Handling subdomains

Faking URL Suffix

<?php
return [
	// ...
	'components' => [
		'urlManager' => [
			'suffix' => '.html',
		],
	],
];

Handling REST

URL parsing

Complimentary to creating URLs Yii is handling transforming custom URLs back into internal route and parameters.

Strict URL parsing

By default if there's no custom rule for URL and URL matches default format such as /site/page Yii tries to run a corresponding controller's action. This behavior could be disabled so if there's no custom rule match, a 404 not found error will be produced immediately.

<?php
return [
	// ...
	'components' => [
		'urlManager' => [
			'enableStrictParsing' => true,
		],
	],
];

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