yii2/docs/guide/start-installation.md

Installing Yii

You can install Yii in two ways, using Composer or downloading an archive file. The former is the preferred way as it allows you to install new extensions or update Yii by running a single command.

Installing via Composer

If you do not already have Composer installed, you may get it by following the instructions at getcomposer.org, or simply

• on Linux or Mac, run the following commands:

  curl -s http://getcomposer.org/installer | php
  mv composer.phar /usr/local/bin/composer
  

• on Windows, download and run Composer-Setup.exe.

Please refer to the Composer Documentation if you encounter any problems or want to learn more about the Composer usage.

With Composer installed, you can install Yii by running the following command under a Web accessible folder:

composer create-project --prefer-dist yiisoft/yii2-app-basic basic

The above command installs Yii as a directory named basic.

Tip: If you want to install the latest development version of Yii, you may use the following command which adds a stability option:

composer create-project --prefer-dist --stability=dev yiisoft/yii2-app-basic basic

Note that the development version of Yii should not be used for production as it may break your running code.

Installing from an Archive File

Installing Yii from an archive file involves two steps:

1. Download the archive file from yiiframework.com;
2. Unpack the downloaded file to a Web accessible folder.

Other Installation Options

The above installation instructions show how to install Yii in terms of a basic Web application that works out of box. It is a good start for small projects or if you just start learning Yii.

There are other installation options available:

• If you only want to install the core framework and would like to build an application from scratch, you may follow the instructions as explained in Building Application from Scratch.
• If you want to start with a more sophisticated application that supports team development environment, you may consider Advanced Application Template.

Verifying Installation

After installation, you can use your browser to access the installed Yii application with the following URL, assuming you have installed Yii in a directory named basic that is under the document root of your Web server,

http://localhost/basic/web/index.php

You should see a "Congratulations!" page in your browser. If not, please check if your PHP installation satisfies Yii's requirements by using one of the following approaches:

• Use a browser to access the URL http://localhost/basic/requirements.php

• Run the following commands:

  cd basic
  php requirements.php
  

You should configure your PHP installation so that it meets the minimum requirement of Yii. In general, you should have PHP 5.4 or above. And you should install the PDO PHP Extension and a corresponding database driver (such as pdo_mysql for MySQL databases), if your application needs a database.

Configuring Web Servers

Info: You may skip this sub-section for now if you are just testing driving Yii with no intention of deploying it to a production server.

The application installed according to the above instructions should work out of box with either an Apache HTTP server or an Nginx HTTP server, on either Windows or Linux.

On a production server, you may want to configure your Web server so that the application can be accessed via the URL http://hostname without the part /basic/web/index.php. This requires configuring your Web server by

• pointing the Web document root to the basic/web folder;
• and hiding index.php from the URL.

By setting basic/web as the document root, you also secure your application by preventing end users from accessing your private application code and sensitive data files that are stored in the sibling directories of basic/web.

Below we show the configurations recommended for Apache and Nginx.

Info: If your application will run in a shared hosting environment where you do not have the permission to modify its Web server setting, you may adjust the structure of your application. Please refer to the Shared Hosting Environment section for more details.

Recommended Apache Configuration

Use the following configuration in Apache's httpd.conf file or within a virtual host configuration. Note that you should replace path/to/basic/web with the actual path of basic/web.

# Set document root to be "basic/web"
DocumentRoot "path/to/basic/web"

<Directory "path/to/basic/web">
    RewriteEngine on

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

    # ...other settings...
</Directory>

Recommended Nginx Configuration

You should have installed PHP as an FPM SAPI for Nginx. Use the following Nginx configuration and replace path/to/basic/web with the actual path of basic/web.

server {
    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/basic/web;
    index       index.php;

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

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

    # uncomment to avoid processing of calls to non-existing 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.

Also note that when running an HTTPS server you need to add fastcgi_param HTTPS on; so that Yii can properly detect if a connection is secure.