This tutorial will explain the installation process via Composer, which is recommended. However if you don’t wish to use it, you can always download the latest snapshot of PHPixie.

Getting Composer
Composer is a package manager for PHP, if you ever used Linux you may be familiar with applications like apt or yum that are used to install all kinds of software. Composer does the very same thing with PHP libraries, you tell it which ones you want, and it downloads them for you. Getting composer is easy, let’s assume we want to install it into our /var/www/ folder, we just need to run this:

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cd /var/www/
php -r "eval('?>'.file_get_contents('http://getcomposer.org/installer'));"
 

After the script executes you should have a composer.phar file in that directory.

Setting up the skeleton project
PHPixie tries to be as flexible as possible, you can dow whatever you want with the API that it provides, but the most standard site would follow a common skeleton architecture. After you have composer.phar in /var/www/ you can just run the following:

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cd /var/www
php composer.phar create-project phpixie/project tutorial 2.*-dev --prefer-dist
cd tutorial

#If you are on Linux
php ../composer.phar update -o

#If you are on Windows
php ..\composer.phar update -o
 

These commands will download the skeleton project together with all its dependencies and optimize your autoloader.

Alternative: Setting up the skeleton project manually

You can get the skeleton application here: https://github.com/dracony/PHPixie . Download is a Zip Archive and extract to /var/www/tutorial.

Instructions for Ubuntu 14.04

There is nothing special with installing PHPixie on Ubuntu, but since it is such a popular environment, here are some additional details on Apache configuration.

Put the following into /etc/apache2/sites-available/001-phpixie.conf

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<VirtualHost *:80>
        ServerName pixie.local

        ServerAdmin webmaster@localhost

        #Assuming you installed PHPixie into /var/www/tutorial
        DocumentRoot /var/www/tutorial/web

        ErrorLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/error.log
        CustomLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/access.log combined
        <Directory /var/www/tutorial/web>
             AllowOverride All
        </Directory>
</VirtualHost>
 

Create a symlink to the file by running:

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sudo ln -s /etc/apache2/sites-available/001-phpixie.conf /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/001-phpixie.conf
 

Add this line to your /etc/hosts:

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127.0.0.1 pixie.local
 

Enable Apache Rewrite module:

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sudo a2enmod rewrite
 

Restart Apache:

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sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart
 

Visit http://pixie.local/ in your browser

Now we need to get all of the PHPixie libraries. This is where Composer comes in, we will use it to download everything that our project needs. In the composer.json file you will see a list of required dependencies like this:

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{
"require": {
        "phpixie/core": "2.*@dev",
        "phpixie/db": "2.*@dev",
        "phpixie/orm": "2.*@dev"
    }   
}
 

This requests PHPixie core and database libraries, if you ever need to add a PHPixie module, or any PHP library to your project you can use that file to request it. Now run this to install dependencies:

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cd /var/www/tutorial
php ../composer.phar install -o --prefer-dist
 

When the script finishes you should have all required libraries installed in your vendor folder. If you ever want to update them to the latest version just run:

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cd /var/www/tutorial
php ../composer.phar update -o --prefer-dist
 

Now all that is left to do is configure your Apache to point it to the /var/www/tutorial/web/ folder, be careful and don’t miss out the /web part of the path. You should see a greeting from PHPixie, so you are on the right track.