This document is for a version of CakePHP that is no longer supported. Please upgrade to a newer release!

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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 on Github. Github houses both CakePHP itself as well as many other plugins for CakePHP. The CakePHP releases are available at Github downloads.

Alternatively you can get fresh off the press code, with all the bug-fixes and up to the minute(well, to the day) enhancements. These can be accessed from github by cloning the repository. CakePHP repository.

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.