README

A CodeIgniter starter application designed to get up and running and to be able to write code that is as clean, and testable as possible.

Installation

With Composer: composer create-project robertmain/codeigniter-starter --dev
Manually: git clone https://github.com/robertmain/codeigniter-starter

Why

CodeIgniter applications are currently very difficult to test, since most rely on the huge God object $this that everything else (including the class loader ಠ_ಠ) decend from.

This project brings Composer into the mix, both to load third-party libraries from Packagist, and to facilitate the namespacing of models. This in-turn allows us to create abstractions of business objects that are more testable as a single unit of code and are easier to deal with in the application.

What

This CodeIgniter starter project provides the following:

Testing

A fully functional PHPUnit/Mockery setup with namespaced models

A Base Model

A basic model abstraction providing some limited CRUD functionality and CRUD lifecycle callbacks. This was inspired by Jamie Rumbelow's Base Model but diverged in order to support soft deletes.

This base model also provides the metadata field names for created_at, updated_at and deleted_at. This is re-used in the abstract base migration to provide the names of the fields to create as datestamp fields.

Templating

The Plates templating engine was broguht in to handle templating in CodeIgniter. This allowed for greater flexibility in frontend layout, particularly in regards to things like template reigions, inheritence and partial re-use etc.

Namespacing

Models can now be namespaced in App\Models. The loader has been extended to support this, however it should behave normally. We get this behaviour for free by using Composer and PSR-4 namespacing in our models.

Please note: due to the way that CodeIgniter loads controllers, controllers cannot be namespaced at this time, otherwise the framework will be unable to locate them.

Environmental Configuration

Dotenv is now used to provide database settings. This prevents database configuration accidentally being comitted and provides an easy, consistent way to setup seperate environments

Composer Scripts

Composer scritps have also been provided to help manage the development of the application. These are:

test:models - Test the application models
test:controllers - Test the application controllers
test - Test models and controllers
docs Generate php docs from the models and controllers
migrate:latest - Run the latest database migration and upgrade the database to the latest version
migrate:flush - Drop the entire database and re-create it. For safety reasons, the application will raise an exception if asked to drop it's database in a production environment

Exceptions

This starter project also includes crazycodr/standard-exceptions which are used to provide a standardised set of PHP exceptions for common scenarios.

robertmain / codeigniter-starter

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