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I’ve been developing with PHP for god knows how long and just got involved with Python MVC frameworks like Pylons and Turbogears. I wanted to share with you (and keep a track record for myself) how to setup CakePHP, a PHP MVC framework, with Windows.

It’s really simple…

1. Get EasyPHP 2.0 - this packages PHP, Apache, and a MySQL DB all together. Download and install.
   • I created a new folder to put all my dev work in, so I installed to C:\webdev\EasyPHP
2. Get CakePHP 1.2 - Download and install
   • I created a dir called ‘C:\webdev\projects\cake_1.2′ (all of my projects will go in the /projects folder)
   • Move the ‘cake’, ‘vendors’ , .htaccess, index.php into this folder
3. Get cygwin if you don’t already have it
4. Add some paths to your env
   • Go to Control Panel > System > Advanced > Env Vars and add the following:
   • C:/webdev/EasyPHP2.0b1/php5/;
   • C:/webdev/EasyPHP2.0b1/php5/ext/;
   • C:/webdev/EasyPHP2.0b1/mysql/bin;
   • C:/webdev/projects/cake_1.2/cake/console;
5. Add folders for the other projects you will be working on
   • I created ‘C:\webdev\projects\proj1′ and ‘C:\webdev\projects\proj2′
   • Within the projX directory I have ‘projX\trunk\app’ which is where all the code will go
   • I will keep proj docs in ‘projX\docs’, so everything is kept together
6. Edit your config files
   • php.ini
     • EasyPHP does this for you, but you can tweak as you’d like
   • httpd.conf (Apache)
     • change DocumentRoot “${path}/www” to DocumentRoot “C:\webdev\projects”
     • change <Directory “${path}/www”> to <Directory “C:\webdev\projects”>
     • Make sure the AllowOverride is set to All for the correct Directory
     • Make sure this line is uncommented
       LoadModule rewrite_module mod_rewrite.so
     • if you want to be able to setup virtual hosts (so you can do http://projX/ instead of http://localhost/blahblah/blah/projx then uncomment the following line:Include conf/extra/httpd-vhosts.conf
7. Add a virtual host for each project you will work on (if you followed the last step)
   • Open C:\webdev\EasyPHP2.0b1\apache\conf\extra\httpd-vhosts.conf
     Add something like this:<VirtualHost *:80>
     DocumentRoot /webdev/projects/projX/trunk/app/webroot
     ServerName projX:80
     ErrorLog logs/projX_error.log
     CustomLog logs/projX_access.log common
     </VirtualHost>
   • Edit C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc\hosts so your comp knows what the IP for the project is. For example:
     127.0.0.1 localhost
     127.0.0.1 proj1
     127.0.0.1 proj2
8. Allow the command line to find mysql
   • I was stuck on this for a long ass time. I kept getting Fatal error: Call to undefined function mysql_connect() .. here’s how to solve that:
   • Copy C:\webdev\EasyPHP2.0b1\php5\php.ini-dist to C:\webdev\EasyPHP2.0b1\php5\php.ini
   • Uncomment this line:
     extension=php_mysql.dll
   • Copy the following files to ‘C:\WINDOWS\system32′ from your php5 dir (not sure if this made a difference, if you can’t bake a projet because you get a undefined function error then do this)
     php5apache2.dll
     php5ts.dll
     php_mysql.dll
     libmysql.dll
     libmysqli.dll
9. Modify cygwin (optional)
   • I downloaded tcsh first
   • Add necessary alias’
10. Bake your first project
    • Open up cygwin
    • cd to /webdev/projects/projX/trunk/app
    • Type ‘cake bake’ in the CLI (command line)
    • All your initial files will be created and copied over from the cake_1.2 dir we setup earlier
    • Edit your database user/pass in the ‘/webdev/projects/projX/trunk/app/config/database file
    • Now you can start to bake your controller, models, etc. Just type cake bake and go!
11. Done!

Okay, I just put up this blog and didn’t realize that people would actually read it. Please give me a week or so to get acquainted with WP and do a little CSS remodeling. I would do it now, but I’m at my other job and have a project I’m working on that’s needs to be finished by end of week.

Incase you are wondering, this blog is going to be a place for me to talk about interesting design patterns, development issues that I found and worked out (or found and borrowed from others..), my love of travel, and frankly anything else I see fit (although it will focus on travel and code).