yii2/docs/guide/tutorial-start-from-scratch.md

Creating your own Application structure

Note: This section is under development.

While basic and advanced application templates are great for most of your needs you may want to create your own application template to start your projects with.

Application templates are repositories containing composer.json and registered as Composer packages so you can make any repository a package and it will be installable via create-project command.

Since it's a bit too much to start building your template from scratch it is better to use one of built-in templates as a base. Let's use basic template.

Clone basic template repository from git

git clone git@github.com:yiisoft/yii2-app-basic.git

And wait till it's downloaded. Since we don't need to push our changes back to Yii's repository we delete .git and all of its contents.

Modify files

Now we need to modify composer.json. Change name, description, keywords, homepage, license, support to match your new template. Adjust require, require-dev, suggest and the rest of the options.

Note: In composer.json file writable under extra is functionality added by Yii that allows you to specify per file permissions to set after an application is created using the template.

Next actually modify the structure of the future application as you like and update readme.

Make a package

Create git repository and push your files there. If you're going to make it open source github is the best way to host it. If it should remain private, any git repository would do.

Then you need to register your package. For public templates it should be registered at packagist. For private ones it is a bit more tricky but well defined in Composer documentation.

Use it

That's it. Now you can create projects using a template:

php composer.phar create-project --prefer-dist --stability=dev mysoft/yii2-app-coolone new-project