Installation

Installing via Composer

The recommended way of installing Yii is by using Composer package manager. If you do not have it, you may download it from http://getcomposer.org/ or run the following command:

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

Yii provides a few ready-to-use application templates. Based on your needs, you may choose one of them to bootstrap your project.

There are two application templates available:

basic that is just a basic frontend application template.
advanced that is a set of frontend, backend, console, common (shared code) and environments support.

Please refer to installation instructions on these pages. To read more about ideas behing these application templates and proposed usage refer to basic application template and advanced application template.

Installing from zip

Installation from zip mainly involves the following two steps:

Download Yii Framework from yiiframework.com.
Unpack the Yii release file to a Web-accessible directory.

Tip: Yii 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 needs to be exposed to Web users. Other PHP scripts, including those from Yii, should be protected from Web access; otherwise they might be exploited by hackers.

Requirements

After installing Yii, you may want to verify that your server satisfies Yii's requirements. You can do so by accessing the requirement checker script via the following URL in a Web browser:

http://hostname/path/to/yii/requirements/index.php

Yii requires PHP 5.3.7, so the server must have PHP 5.3.7 or above installed and available to the web server. Yii has been tested with Apache HTTP server on Windows and Linux. It may also run on other Web servers and platforms, provided PHP 5.3 is supported.

Recommended Apache Configuration

Yii is ready to work with a default Apache web server configuration. The .htaccess files in Yii framework and application folders deny access to the restricted resources. To hide the bootstrap file (usually index.php) in your URLs you can add mod_rewrite instructions to the .htaccess file in your document root or to the virtual host configuration:

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

You can use Yii with Nginx and PHP with FPM SAPI. Here is a sample host configuration. It defines the bootstrap file and makes Yii to catch all requests to nonexistent files, which allows us to have nice-looking URLs.

server {
    set $host_path "/www/mysite";
    access_log  /www/mysite/log/access.log  main;

    server_name  mysite;
    root  $host_path/htdocs;
    set $yii_bootstrap "index.php";

    charset utf-8;

    location / {
        index  index.html $yii_bootstrap;
        try_files $uri $uri/ /$yii_bootstrap?$args;
    }

    location ~ ^/(protected|framework|themes/\w+/views) {
        deny  all;
    }

    #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;
    }

    # pass the PHP scripts to FastCGI server listening on 127.0.0.1:9000
    #
    location ~ \.php {
        fastcgi_split_path_info  ^(.+\.php)(.*)$;

        #let yii catch the calls to unexising PHP files
        set $fsn /$yii_bootstrap;
        if (-f $document_root$fastcgi_script_name){
            set $fsn $fastcgi_script_name;
        }

        fastcgi_pass   127.0.0.1:9000;
        include fastcgi_params;
        fastcgi_param  SCRIPT_FILENAME  $document_root$fsn;

        #PATH_INFO and PATH_TRANSLATED can be omitted, but RFC 3875 specifies them for CGI
        fastcgi_param  PATH_INFO        $fastcgi_path_info;
        fastcgi_param  PATH_TRANSLATED  $document_root$fsn;
    }

    location ~ /\.ht {
        deny  all;
    }
}

Using this configuration you can set cgi.fix_pathinfo=0 in php.ini to avoid many unnecessary system stat() calls.

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