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CakePHP Conventions

We are big fans of convention over configuration. While it takes a bit of time to learn CakePHP’s conventions, you save time in the long run. By following conventions, you get free functionality, and you liberate yourself from the maintenance nightmare of tracking config files. Conventions also make for a very uniform development experience, allowing other developers to jump in and help.

Controller Conventions

Controller class names are plural, PascalCased, and end in Controller. UsersController and ArticleCategoriesController are both examples of conventional controller names.

Public methods on Controllers are often exposed as ‘actions’ accessible through a web browser. For example the /users/view maps to the view() method of the UsersController out of the box. Protected or private methods cannot be accessed with routing.

URL Considerations for Controller Names

As you’ve just seen, single word controllers map to a simple lower case URL path. For example, UsersController (which would be defined in the file name UsersController.php) is accessed from http://example.com/users.

While you can route multiple word controllers in any way you like, the convention is that your URLs are lowercase and dashed using the DashedRoute class, therefore /article-categories/view-all is the correct form to access the ArticleCategoriesController::viewAll() action.

When you create links using this->Html->link(), you can use the following conventions for the url array:

$this->Html->link('link-title', [
    'prefix' => 'MyPrefix' // PascalCased
    'plugin' => 'MyPlugin', // PascalCased
    'controller' => 'ControllerName', // PascalCased
    'action' => 'actionName' // camelBacked
]

For more information on CakePHP URLs and parameter handling, see Connecting Routes.

File and Class Name Conventions

In general, filenames match the class names, and follow the PSR-4 standard for autoloading. The following are some examples of class names and their filenames:

  • The Controller class LatestArticlesController would be found in a file named LatestArticlesController.php

  • The Component class MyHandyComponent would be found in a file named MyHandyComponent.php

  • The Table class OptionValuesTable would be found in a file named OptionValuesTable.php.

  • The Entity class OptionValue would be found in a file named OptionValue.php.

  • The Behavior class EspeciallyFunkableBehavior would be found in a file named EspeciallyFunkableBehavior.php

  • The View class SuperSimpleView would be found in a file named SuperSimpleView.php

  • The Helper class BestEverHelper would be found in a file named BestEverHelper.php

Each file would be located in the appropriate folder/namespace in your app folder.

Database Conventions

Table names corresponding to CakePHP models are plural and underscored. For example users, article_categories, and user_favorite_pages respectively.

Field/Column names with two or more words are underscored: first_name.

Foreign keys in hasMany, belongsTo/hasOne relationships are recognized by default as the (singular) name of the related table followed by _id. So if Users hasMany Articles, the articles table will refer to the users table via a user_id foreign key. For a table like article_categories whose name contains multiple words, the foreign key would be article_category_id.

Join tables, used in BelongsToMany relationships between models, should be named after the model tables they will join or the bake command won’t work, arranged in alphabetical order (articles_tags rather than tags_articles). If you need to add additional columns on the junction table you should create a separate entity/table class for that table.

In addition to using an auto-incrementing integer as primary keys, you can also use UUID columns. CakePHP will create UUID values automatically using (Cake\Utility\Text::uuid()) whenever you save new records using the Table::save() method.

Model Conventions

Table class names are plural, PascalCased and end in Table. UsersTable, ArticleCategoriesTable, and UserFavoritePagesTable are all examples of table class names matching the users, article_categories and user_favorite_pages tables respectively.

Entity class names are singular PascalCased and have no suffix. User, ArticleCategory, and UserFavoritePage are all examples of entity names matching the users, article_categories and user_favorite_pages tables respectively.

View Conventions

View template files are named after the controller functions they display, in an underscored form. The viewAll() function of the ArticlesController class will look for a view template in src/Template/Articles/view_all.ctp.

The basic pattern is src/Template/Controller/underscored_function_name.ctp.

Note

By default CakePHP uses English inflections. If you have database tables/columns that use another language, you will need to add inflection rules (from singular to plural and vice-versa). You can use Cake\Utility\Inflector to define your custom inflection rules. See the documentation about Inflector for more information.

Plugins Conventions

It is useful to prefix a CakePHP plugin with “cakephp-” in the package name. This makes the name semantically related on the framework it depends on.

Do not use the CakePHP namespace (cakephp) as vendor name as this is reserved to CakePHP owned plugins. The convention is to use lowercase letters and dashes as separator:

// Bad
cakephp/foo-bar

// Good
your-name/cakephp-foo-bar

Summarized

By naming the pieces of your application using CakePHP conventions, you gain functionality without the hassle and maintenance tethers of configuration. Here’s a final example that ties the conventions together:

  • Database table: “articles”

  • Table class: ArticlesTable, found at src/Model/Table/ArticlesTable.php

  • Entity class: Article, found at src/Model/Entity/Article.php

  • Controller class: ArticlesController, found at src/Controller/ArticlesController.php

  • View template, found at src/Template/Articles/index.ctp

Using these conventions, CakePHP knows that a request to http://example.com/articles maps to a call on the index() function of the ArticlesController, where the Articles model is automatically available (and automatically tied to the ‘articles’ table in the database), and renders to a file. None of these relationships have been configured by any means other than by creating classes and files that you’d need to create anyway.

Now that you’ve been introduced to CakePHP’s fundamentals, you might try a run through the Content Management Tutorial to see how things fit together.

See awesome list recommendations for details.