Installing Yii

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

Note: Unlike with Yii 1, standard installations of Yii 2 results in both the framework and an application skeleton being downloaded and installed.

Installing via Composer

If you do not already have Composer installed, you may do so by following the instructions at getcomposer.org. On Linux and Mac OS X, you'll run the following commands:

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

On Windows, you'll download and run Composer-Setup.exe.

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

Download the archive file from yiiframework.com.
Unpack the downloaded file to a Web-accessible folder.

Other Installation Options

The above installation instructions show how to install Yii, which also creates a basic Web application that works out of the box. This approach is a good starting point for small projects, or for when you just start learning Yii.

But there are other installation options available:

If you only want to install the core framework and would like to build an entire 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, better suited to team development environments, you may consider installing the Advanced Application Template.

Verifying the Installation

After installation, you can use your browser to access the installed Yii application with the following URL:

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

This URL assumes you have installed Yii in a directory named basic, directly under the Web server's document root directory, and that the Web server is running on your local machine (localhost). You may need to adjust it to your installation environment.

You should see the above "Congratulations!" page in your browser. If not, please check if your PHP installation satisfies Yii's requirements. You can check if the minimum requirements are met 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 requirements of Yii. Most importantly, you should have PHP 5.4 or above. You should also 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 subsection for now if you are just test 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 Windows, Mac OS X, 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://www.example.com/index.php instead of http://www.example.com/basic/web/index.php. Such configuration requires pointing the document root of your Web server to the basic/web folder. You may also want to hide index.php from the URL, as described in the URL Parsing and Generation section. In this subsection, you'll learn how to configure your Apache or Nginx server to achieve these goals.

Info: By setting basic/web as the document root, you also prevent end users from accessing your private application code and sensitive data files that are stored in the sibling directories of basic/web. Denying access to those other folders is a producent security improvement.

Info: If your application will run in a shared hosting environment where you do not have permission to modify its Web server configuration, you may still adjust the structure of your application for better security. 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 for 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 to use Nginx. Use the following Nginx configuration, replacing path/to/basic/web with the actual path for basic/web and mysite.local with the actual hostname to serve.

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/basic/log/access.log main;
    error_log   /path/to/basic/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 also 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.

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