PHP install script - Codeigniter

Question

Hi all, I have an application developed with codeIgniter that I would like to write a nice user friendly install script for. The biggest problem with this is that code-igniter needs configuration manually before this can happen, does anyone know a way around this / the the best way to allow this with minimal configuration?

Answer 1

Hi there,

I assume you can introduce a flag parameter either in master index.php file outside system directory or config file inside the system/config to see if setup has previously run or not, also you should not get any error from database before calling any model in your controllers.

Answer 2

If your configuration is built into a form you could include the configuration in the install.

The form would need to validate and verify configuration options such as testing database connections and validating the urls.

Take a look at how WordPress do their 5 minute install. It has a couple of customisations and tests them before proceeding.

Answer 3

Hey

You can get the content out of the config files and write (or overwrite) them.

Answer 4

There are really only 2 areas in a codeigniter project that need manual configuration:

1. the index.php front controller for the application
2. the config.php file in the application directory

There are a ton of configuration options that you can use but basically you're going to need to know:

1. the base URL for the application
2. the base path the application/system folder reside on

You can determine #2 by the path you just installed the application to.

If your application is running at the docroot you could set the base url to:

"http://".$_SERVER['SERVER_NAME']."/";

otherwise you'll need to ask the user what URL this application is supposed to reside at.