Installing CakePHP on IIS 7

TobinTitus — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 14:15:00 GMT

Recently I spoke with someone on Twitter who was having issues running CakePHP on IIS. With all the talk about ASP.NET MVC on IIS, folks forget that the MVC pattern works in other languages as well. CakePHP provides MVC development on PHP. That said, I wanted to dive in and see what the issues were involved in getting this project up and running on IIS 7. I managed to get it installed pretty quickly, but it does take a little tweaking to get you up and running. I've chronicled my adventures with CakePHP below in case anyone else is having issues. That said, I must first say that I am not an expert working with CakePHP. This was my first experience with the project, so this information is provided "as-is" and should be taken with a grain of salt. With this demo, I’ll be walking through the "Cake Blog Tutorial” offered on cakephp.org, and modifying it as needed to work with IIS 7. That said, let's get started.

Prerequisites

Install: IIS 7 on Windows 2008 Server or Windows Vista
- Install: PHP for IIS 7.0. Use the Web Platform Installer for easiest experience.
- Install: URL Rewriter module. Use the Web Platform Installer for easiest experience.
Install: A database supported by CakePHP. This post uses MySQL.
Download: CakePHP source code
- Unzip: CakePHP (entire contents) to the intended path

Yes, there ARE a lot of Prerequisites, but these are pretty typical for any MVC app on any platform.

Assumptions / Conventions

For the purposes of this post, I will use the convention/assumption that you have unzipped CakePHP to c:\inetpub\CakePHP\ . You should have the following paths now:

c:\inetpub\CakePHP\
- \app
- \cake
- \vendors
- .htaccess
- index.php
- version.txt

I will also use the assumption that this is being installed on the "Default Web Site". This is unlikely what you are doing, so you'll want to replace the "Default Web Site" instances in the steps below with your site or application path.

Lastly, I will assume that you are using and have already installed MySQL. You may use another database if you please, but this blog will reference MySQL.

Installing the Blog Sample

Pointing IIS to the cake document root

First, you'll need to configure your website to point to the correct location. Using the assumptions above, the correct location would be c:\inetpub\CakePHP\app\webroot\ .

Creating a Blog Database

Second, configure your database connection. To do this, you’ll need to create a blog database, and then point your configuration to that new catalog.

Start by creating a new MySQL Catalog using your favorite tool. I used MySQL Administrator. Simply right click in the catalogs and click “create new schema.”

Create a schema named “CakeBlog”. Once the schema is created, click on the “Tools” menu and select “MySQL Query Browser” and execute the following script:

/* First, create our posts table: */
CREATE TABLE posts (
    id INT UNSIGNED AUTO_INCREMENT PRIMARY KEY,
    title VARCHAR(50),
    body TEXT,
    created DATETIME DEFAULT NOT NULL,
    modified DATETIME DEFAULT NOT NULL8.);

/* Then insert some posts for testing: */
INSERT INTO posts (title,body,created)
    VALUES ('The title', 'This is the post body.', NOW());
INSERT INTO posts (title,body,created)
    VALUES ('A title once again', 'And the post body follows.', NOW());
INSERT INTO posts (title,body,created)
    VALUES ('Title strikes back', 'This is really exciting! Not.', NOW());

* This SQL code copied verbatim from tutorial found here:

http://book.cakephp.org/view/326/The-Cake-Blog-Tutorial

You’ve now created your database and a blog posts table with some default posts. Time to configure CakePHP to read from the database:

Cake Database Configuration

We’ll need to let CakePHP know where the database is. Copy database.php.default in c:\inetpub\CakePHP\app\config\ to database.php

Open c:\inetpub\cakephp\app\config\database.php and change the $default variable to point to your database:
var $default = array('driver'       => 'mysql',
                                'connect'   => 'mysql_connect',
                                'host'         => 'localhost',
                                'login'        => 'CakeBlog',
                                'password' => 'c4ke-1z-k00l',
                                'database' => 'CakeBlog',
                                'prefix'      => '');

* This PHP code copied nearly verbatim from tutorial found here:

http://book.cakephp.org/view/326/The-Cake-Blog-Tutorial

You should not be able to open your browser to your application and see the default cake configuration page.

Setting up Rewriting Rules

CakePHP uses mod_rewrite, but also provides the ability to use Cake’s built-in ‘pretty URLs’. We’ll be importing the mod_rewrite rules from the .htaccess files from the default cakephp installation into the IIS URL Rewrite module. We’ll then have to modify those rules.

Start this process by opening the IIS Management Console. Open your application path. In this instance, we are using “Default Web Site”.

Click on the “Default Web Site”
Open the “URL Rewrite” module
Click on “Import Rules…” in the Actions pane
Click the “…” button next to the “Configuration file” textbox.
Select the c:\inetpub\cakephp\.htaccess file and click “OK”
Click the “Import” button
Click the “Apply” button in the “Actions” pane
Repeat steps 4, 5, 6 and 7 for c:\inetpub\cakephp\app\.htaccess and c:\inetpub\cakephp\app\webroot\.htaccess files.

The rules are imported, but now you’ll need to edit the rules.

Click the “Back to Rules” button in the “Actions” pane
Edit the two rules with the action starting with “webroot/”
Remove the “webroot” portion of the “Rewrite URL”. Your paths should now look as follows:

Creating your MVC Application

The remainder of your application setup should follow the steps found in the original “Cake Blog Tutorial”. There is nothing different between IIS and Apache at this point, so copying the steps would be a bit redundant. Start with the step named “Create a Post Model”. Much like ASP.NET MVC, Cake provides an MVC pattern for developing PHP applications.

Once you have completed the steps, you should have a default site that looks something like the following:

Summary

Installing CakePHP on IIS is actually not much different from installing on Apache. The main difference lies in the implementation of mod_rewrite on Apache vs URL Rewriter in IIS. Obviously the installation of PHP differs from Apache. IIS makes the installation of PHP simple with Web Application Installer. If you are using CakePHP on IIS, I would be interested to hear if your experience was different than mine.

Find New IIS7 Extensions at http://www.iis.net/extensions/

bills — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 22:55:00 GMT

I’m happy to announce that IIS7 Extensions have found their home at http://www.iis.net/extensions

Every since IIS7 shipped 9 months ago, the IIS team has been cranking away adding new features to the platform. Last time I blogged about how we do this, I realized we didn’t have a single place to learn about all of them, so I kicked off an effort within the team to create this. Now that the pages are up, it is amazing to see how many new capabilities are already available on top of IIS7…which all by itself had more new features than any other IIS release in the history of the product. It is a testament to not only the ingenuity and hard work of the IIS team, but a real validation that IIS7 is not just a Web server, it is a server platform. All of these new features are built on top of public extensibility points that any developer can use, and provide a seamless runtime, configuration and administration experience that looks and feels like they were built into the product to begin with! Here they are:

Landing page: http://www.iis.net/extensions

http://www.iis.net/AdministrationPack

http://www.iis.net/ApplicationRequestRouting

http://www.iis.net/BitRateThrottling

http://www.iis.net/DatabaseManager

http://www.iis.net/FTP

http://www.iis.net/IISManager

http://www.iis.net/PowerShell

http://www.iis.net/SmoothStreaming

http://www.iis.net/URLRewrite

http://www.iis.net/UrlScan

http://www.iis.net/WebDeploymentTool

http://www.iis.net/WebPlaylists

http://www.iis.net/WebDAV

Check out the more than a dozen new features available today! Over the next few weeks we’ll be adding video demos of each feature and more new content. Stay tuned for many cool new features to come!

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