Yii 2 Practical-A Application Template is a skeleton Yii 2 application based on the yii2-app-practical template, which in turn is based on the yii2-advanced template.

Since its based on the yii2-advanced template it is suitable for developing complex Web applications with multiple tiers. The template allows a practical method to directly access the frontend from the approot and backend from approot/backend.

The template includes three tiers: front end, back end, and console, each of which is a separate Yii application.

The template is designed to work in a team development environment. It supports deploying the application in different environments.

After installing a app, in the yii2-advanced application you normally would access the frontend and backend by:

http://domain/app/frontend/web
http://domain/app/backend/web

However, in many practical scenarios (especially on shared and single domain hosts) one would want their users to directly access frontend and backend as:

http://domain/app
http://domain/app/backend

The yii2-app-practical-a enables you to achieve just that by carefully moving and rearranging the bootstrap files and web components of frontend to work directly out of the app root and backend out of the backend. The frontend/web and backend/web folders are entirely eliminated and one can directly access the application frontend this way:

http://domain/app

and backend this way

http://domain/backend

All other aspects of the app configuration remain the same as the yii2-advanced app. The common, and console will remain as is. The frontend config, assets, models, controllers, views, widgets and components, will still reside within the frontend directory. The backend config, assets, models, controllers, views, widgets and components, will still reside within the backend directory. It is just the web access that is moved out to app root for frontend and to the backend root folder for backend.

ROOT
    /                   contains the frontend entry script and web resources
    /assets             contains the frontend web assets
common
	config/				contains shared configurations
	mail/				contains view files for e-mails
	models/				contains model classes used in both backend and frontend
	tests/				contains various tests for objects that are common among applications
console
	config/				contains console configurations
	controllers/		contains console controllers (commands)
	migrations/			contains database migrations
	models/				contains console-specific model classes
	runtime/			contains files generated during runtime
	tests/				contains various tests for the console application
backend
    /                   contains the backend entry script and web resources
	assets/			    contains backend runtime assets
	assets_b/			contains backend application assets such as JavaScript and CSS
	config/				contains backend configurations
	controllers/		contains Web controller classes
	models/				contains backend-specific model classes
	runtime/			contains files generated during runtime
	tests/				contains various tests for the backend application
	views/				contains view files for the Web application
frontend
	assets/				contains application assets such as JavaScript and CSS
	config/				contains frontend configurations
	controllers/		contains Web controller classes
	models/				contains frontend-specific model classes
	runtime/			contains files generated during runtime
	tests/				contains various tests for the frontend application
	views/				contains view files for the Web application
vendor/					contains dependent 3rd-party packages
environments/			contains environment-based overrides

The minimum requirement by this application template is that your Web server supports PHP 5.4.0.

Extract the archive file downloaded from GitHub to a directory named practical-a or your app name, that is directly under the Web root.

Then follow the instructions given in "GETTING STARTED".

The preferred way to install this application template is through composer. If you do not have Composer, you may install it by following the instructions at getcomposer.org.

You can then install the application using the following command:

php composer.phar create-project --prefer-dist --stability=dev kartik-v/yii2-app-practical-a practical-a

After you install the application, you have to conduct the following steps to initialize the installed application. You only need to do these once for all.

1. Run command init to initialize the application with a specific environment.
2. Create a new database and adjust the components['db'] configuration in common/config/main-local.php accordingly.
3. Apply migrations with console command yii migrate. This will create tables needed for the application to work.
4. Set document roots of your Web server:

• for frontend /path/to/yii-application/ and using the URL http://frontend/
• for backend /path/to/yii-application/backend/web/ and using the URL http://backend/

FRONTEND ACCESS: Just navigate to http://yourdomain/practical-a (where practical-a is your app name folder under web root).

BACKEND ACCESS: Just navigate to http://yourdomain/practical-a/backend (where practical-a is your app name folder under web root).

To login into the application, you need to first sign up, with any of your email address, username and password. Then, you can login into the application with same email address and password at any time.

Install additional composer packages:

• php composer.phar require --dev "codeception/codeception: 1.8.*@dev" "codeception/specify: *" "codeception/verify: *"

This application boilerplate use database in testing, so you should create three databases that are used in tests:

• yii2_practical-a_unit - database for unit tests;
• yii2_practical-a_functional - database for functional tests;
• yii2_practical-a_acceptance - database for acceptance tests.

To make your database up to date, you can run in needed test folder yii migrate, for example if you are starting from frontend tests then you should run yii migrate in each suite folder acceptance, functional, unit it will upgrade your database to the last state according migrations.

To be able to run acceptance tests you need a running webserver. For this you can use the php builtin server and run it in the directory where your main project folder is located. For example if your application is located in /www/practical-a all you need to is: cd /www and then php -S 127.0.0.1:8080 because the default configuration of acceptance tests expects the url of the application to be /practical-a/. If you already have a server configured or your application is not located in a folder called practical-a, you may need to adjust the TEST_ENTRY_URL in frontend/tests/_bootstrap.php and backend/tests/_bootstrap.php.

After that is done you should be able to run your tests, for example to run frontend tests do:

• cd frontend
• ../vendor/bin/codecept build
• ../vendor/bin/codecept run

In similar way you can run tests for other application tiers - backend, console, common.

You also can adjust you application suite configs and _bootstrap.php settings to use other urls and files, as it is can be done in yii2-basic.