How To Install CakePHP on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS

In this tutorial, we will show you how to install CakePHP on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, CakePHP is an open-source web framework written in PHP that follows the Model-View-Controller (MVC) architectural pattern and conventions of Ruby on Rails, it uses conventions over configuration approach and provides a set of built-in tools for common web development tasks, it also has a large and active community that contributes to the framework

This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of the CakePHP on Ubuntu 22.04 (Jammy Jellyfish). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 22.04 and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint, Elementary OS, Pop!_OS, and more as well.

Prerequisites

• A server running one of the following operating systems: Ubuntu 22.04, 20.04, and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint.
• It’s recommended that you use a fresh OS install to prevent any potential issues.
• SSH access to the server (or just open Terminal if you’re on a desktop).
• An active internet connection. You’ll need an internet connection to download the necessary packages and dependencies for CakePHP.
• A non-root sudo user or access to the root user. We recommend acting as a non-root sudo user, however, as you can harm your system if you’re not careful when acting as the root.

Install CakePHP on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy Jellyfish

Step 1. First, make sure that all your system packages are up-to-date by running the following apt commands in the terminal.

sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade

Step 2. Installing LAMP Stack on Ubuntu 22.04.

Before starting this tutorial, the LAMP server must be installed on your server. If you do not have LAMP Stack installed, you can follow our guide here.

Step 3. Installing Composer on Ubuntu 22.04.

By default, the Composer is not available on Ubuntu 22.04 base repository. Now run the following command below to download the Composer installer using wget command:

wget -O composer-setup.php https://getcomposer.org/installer

After the Composer has been downloaded, then execute the following command on the command line to install and setup composer on the Linux Ubuntu system:

php composer-setup.php --install-dir=/usr/local/bin --filename=composer

Confirm the installation and check the installed build version of Composer:

composer -V

For additional resources on installing Composer, read the post below:

• How to install Composer on Ubuntu Linux √

Step 4. Installing CakePHP on Ubuntu 22.04.

Now we create a new project using CakePHP Application Skeleton:

sudo mkdir /srv/projects
cd /srv/projects
sudo composer create-project --prefer-dist cakephp/app [project-name]

For example:

sudo composer create-project --prefer-dist cakephp/app idroot

Your Application directory setup should look something like the following:

$ cd app
$ ls -1
README.md
bin
composer.json
composer.lock
config
index.php
logs
phpcs.xml
phpstan.neon
phpunit.xml.dist
plugins
resources
src
templates
tests
tmp
vendor
webroot

Next, set database connection settings on config/app.php:

nano config/app.php

Add the following file:

*/
    'Datasources' => [
        'default' => [
            'className' => 'Cake\Database\Connection',
            'driver' => 'Cake\Database\Driver\Mysql',
            'persistent' => false,
            'host' => 'localhost',
            /*
             * CakePHP will use the default DB port based on the driver selected
             * MySQL on MAMP uses port 8889, MAMP users will want to uncomment
             * the following line and set the port accordingly
             */
            //'port' => 'non_standard_port_number',
            'username' => 'myproject_user',
            'password' => 'Your-Strong-Password',
            'database' => 'myfirstproject',
            /*
             * You do not need to set this flag to use full utf-8 encoding (internal default since CakePHP 3.6).
             */
            //'encoding' => 'utf8mb4',
            'timezone' => 'UTC',
            'flags' => [],
            'cacheMetadata' => true,
            'log' => false,

Save and close the file, then start the development server to check that your installation is working as expected:

cd /srv/projects/app idroot
bin/cake server

Step 5. Accessing CakePHP Web Interface.

Once successfully installed, open your web browser and access the CakePHP Web UI using the URL http://your-IP-address:8765. You will be redirected to the following page:

Congratulations! You have successfully installed CakePHP. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing CakePHP on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy Jellyfish system. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you check the official CakePHP website.