This document is for a version of CakePHP that is no longer supported. Please upgrade to a newer release!
Installation Preparation¶
CakePHP is fast and easy to install. The minimum requirements are a webserver and a copy of Cake, that’s it! While this manual focuses primarily on setting up with Apache (because it’s the most common), you can configure Cake to run on a variety of web servers such as LightHTTPD or Microsoft IIS.
Installation preparation consists of the following steps:
Downloading a copy of CakePHP
Configuring your web server to handle php if necessary
Checking file permissions
Getting CakePHP¶
There are two main ways to get a fresh copy of CakePHP. You can either download an archive copy (zip/tar.gz/tar.bz2) from the main website, or check out the code from the git repository.
To download the latest major release of CakePHP. Visit the main website https://cakephp.org and follow the “Download Now” link.
All current releases of CakePHP are hosted at CakeForge, the home of CakePHP. This site also contains links to many other CakePHP projects, including plugins and applications for CakePHP. The CakePHP releases are available at https://github.com/cakephp/cakephp/downloads.
Alternatively nightly builds are produced which include bug-fixes and up to the minute(well, to the day) enhancements. These can be accessed from the download index here: https://cakephp.org/downloads/index/nightly. For true up to the minute updates, you can check out directly from the development branch of the git repository here: https://github.com/cakephp/cakephp.
Permissions¶
CakePHP uses the /app/tmp directory for a number of different operations. Model descriptions, cached views, and session information are just a few examples.
As such, make sure the /app/tmp directory in your cake installation is writable by the web server user.