Installation

There are two ways you can install the Yii framework:

Using Composer
Via manual download

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:

basic, just a basic frontend application template.
advanced, 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 ideas behind these application templates and proposed usage, refer to the basic application template and advanced application template documents.

Installing from zip

Installation from a zip file involves two steps:

Downloading the Yii Framework from yiiframework.com.
Unpacking the downloaded file.

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.

Copy the requirements folder from the downloaded Yii directory to your web directory.
Access http://hostname/path/to/yii/requirements/index.php in your browser.

Yii 2 requires PHP 5.4.0 or higher. Yii has been tested with the Apache 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 and application folders to deny access to thoe restricted resources.

By default, requests for pages in a Yii-based site go through the boostrap file, usually named index.php, and placed in the application's root 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 found in your web document root (or add the instructions to the virtual host configuration in Apache's httpd.conf file). 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 identifies 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 {
    charset utf-8;

    listen       80;
    server_name  mysite.local;
    root         /path/to/project/webroot/directory

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

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

    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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