Installation

There are two ways you can install the Yii framework:

Installation via Composer (recommended)
Download an application template packed with all requirements including the Yii Framework

Installing via Composer

The recommended way to install Yii is to use the Composer package manager. If you do not already have Composer installed, you may download it from http://getcomposer.org/ or run the following command:

curl -s http://getcomposer.org/installer | php

For problems or more information, see the official Composer guide:

With Composer installed, you can create a new Yii site using one of Yii's ready-to-use application templates. Based on your needs, choosing the right template can help bootstrap your project.

Currently, there are two application templates available:

The Basic Application Template - just a basic frontend application template.
The Advanced Application Template - consisting of a frontend, a backend, console resources, common (shared code), and support for environments.

For installation instructions for these templates, see the above linked pages. To read more about the ideas behind these application templates and proposed usage, refer to the basic application template and advanced application template documents.

If you do not want to use a template and want to start from scratch you'll find information in the document about creating your own application structure. This is only recommended for advanced users.

Installing from zip

Installation from a zip file involves two steps:

Downloading an application template from yiiframework.com.
Unpacking the downloaded file.

If you only want the Yii Framework files you can download a ZIP file directly from github. To create your application you might want to follow the steps described in creating your own application structure. This is only recommended for advanced users.

Tip: The Yii framework itself does not need to be installed under a web-accessible directory. A Yii application has one entry script which is usually the only file that absolutely must be exposed to web users (i.e., placed within the web directory). Other PHP scripts, including those part of the Yii Framework, should be protected from web access to prevent possible exploitation by hackers.

Requirements

After installing Yii, you may want to verify that your server satisfies Yii's requirements. You can do so by running the requirement checker script in a web browser or from the command line.

If you have installed a Yii application template via zip or composer you'll find a requirements.php file in the base directory of your application.

In order to run this script on the command line use the following command:

php requirements.php

In order to run this script in your browser, you should ensure it is accessable by the webserver and access http://hostname/path/to/yii-app/requirements.php in your browser. If you are using Linux you can create a hard link to make it accessable, using the following command:

ln requirements.php ../requirements.php

Yii 2 requires PHP 5.4.0 or higher. Yii has been tested with the Apache HTTP server and Nginx HTTP server on Windows and Linux. Yii may also be usable on other web servers and platforms, provided that PHP 5.4 or higher is supported.

Recommended Apache Configuration

Yii is ready to work with a default Apache web server configuration. As a security measure, Yii comes with .htaccess files in the Yii framework folder to deny access to those restricted resources.

By default, requests for pages in a Yii-based site go through the bootstrap file, usually named index.php, and placed in the application's web directory. The result will be URLs in the format http://hostname/index.php/controller/action/param/value.

To hide the bootstrap file in your URLs, add mod_rewrite instructions to the .htaccess file in your web document root (or add the instructions to the virtual host configuration in Apache's httpd.conf file, Directory section for your webroot). The applicable instructions are:

RewriteEngine on

# If a directory or a file exists, use it directly
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
# Otherwise forward it to index.php
RewriteRule . index.php

Recommended Nginx Configuration

Yii can also be used with the popular Nginx web server, so long it has PHP installed as an FPM SAPI. Below is a sample host configuration for a Yii-based site on Nginx. The configuration tells the server to send all requests for non-existent resources through the bootstrap file, resulting in "prettier" URLs without the need for index.php references.

server {
    set $yii_bootstrap "index.php";
    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/project/web;
    index       $yii_bootstrap;

    access_log  /path/to/project/log/access.log  main;
    error_log   /path/to/project/log/error.log;

    location / {
        # Redirect everything that isn't real file to yii bootstrap file including arguments.
        try_files $uri $uri/ /$yii_bootstrap?$args;
    }

    # uncomment to avoid processing of calls to unexisting 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 set cgi.fix_pathinfo=0 in the php.ini file in order to avoid many unnecessary system stat() calls.

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