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CodeIgniter Community Voice - HOWTO: Set up a CodeIgniter project in Subversion
EllisLab is blessed with two of the greatest communities that can be found anywhere on the internet in ExpressionEngine and more recently CodeIgniter. Despite being a relative newcomer to the scene, the people attracted to CodeIgniter are among the smartest, most talented and down-to-earth developers around today. From time to time we want to highlight some of these talented people, and we’ve asked them to lend their voice to ours. Have your voice. I hope you enjoy what they have to say as much as I did.
This week, our Community Voice author is Bruce Alderson, known on the forums as madmaxx, who has written a wonderful guide on how he uses subversion with CodeIgniter. Bruce is an elder web monkey and systems programmer. He totally digs the craft of building software, making cool stuff, and causing people to laugh so hard liquids are forced from their nose. He’s currently the Chief Monkey at Discovery Software and author of the not-at-all famous robotpony.ca. (Go read the one about shaving your yak)
After working with CodeIgniter for a few months (and WordPress for a few years), I’ve settled on a way to set up web projects that works well for development, deployment, and source control. Note that this style of layout only works on systems like Mac and Linux that have useful symlinks.
First, the folder layout
some-domain.com/
app/
config/
controllers/
(etc)
public/
.htaccess -> ../site-extras/.htaccess
favicon.ico -> ../site-extras/favicon.ico
js/ -> ../site-extras/js
images/ -> ../site-extras/images
system/
application/ -> ../../app/
site-extras/
js/
images/
.htaccess
The layout favours a vhost setup, and splits your code and resources out of the CodeIgniter sources. Splitting your stuff from the CodeIgniter stuff lets you link your Subversion repository to theirs, so that you can keep it in sync with their development.
How it’s done
- Set up your source tree (not including the symlinks or CodeIgniter source) and add to your Subversion repo.
- Add a svn link to CodeIgniter’s repo (via svn propedit svn:externals, with public http://dev.ellislab.com/svn/CodeIgniter/tags/v1.6.2/) and run a svn update to grab the framework. See the Subversion docs for details.
- Copy the CI application folder to the site root (as app), remove the .svn folders, symlink to application, and add it to your local svn repo.
- Symlink the other site-extras to the public webserver root, and configure your local machine (and public webserver) to point to this root for the domain’s virtual host setup.
- Alternatively, you can modify the $application_path to point to ../public/app/ (I’m not sure which is better yet). See the CodeIgniter docs on apps for more details.
You now have a CodeIgnitor project ready for development. You can keep up-to-date with CodeIgniter updates, deploy easily, and get at your code without wading through extra levels of hierarchy.
Posted by Derek Allard on August 15, 2008
