Installation ============ Installation of Yii mainly involves the following two steps: 1. Download Yii Framework from [yiiframework.com](http://www.yiiframework.com/). 2. 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, so the server must have PHP 5.3 or above installed and available to the web server. Yii has been tested with [Apache HTTP server](http://httpd.apache.org/) 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](http://wiki.nginx.org/) and PHP with [FPM SAPI](http://php.net/install.fpm). 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.