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The Yii 2 Practical-B Application Template is a skeleton Yii 2 application based on the yii2-basic template best for rapidly creating small projects. The template allows a practical method to directly access the application from the app root.

The template contains the basic features including user login/logout and a contact page. It includes all commonly used configurations that would allow you to focus on adding new features to your application.

Why yii2-practical-b?

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

http://domain/app/web

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

http://domain/app

The yii2-app-practical-b 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. The web folder is entirely eliminated and one can directly access the application frontend this way:

http://domain/app

All other aspects of the app configuration remain the same as the yii2-basic app. The original assets folder in the approot is renamed to assets_b, while the web/assets folder moves to app root.

SOME KEY ADDITIONS

1. The template has some security preconfigured for users with Apache web servers. It has a default .htaccess security configuration setup.
2. The template has prettyUrl enabled by default and the changes have been made to .htaccess as well as urlManager component config in the config directory.

DIRECTORY STRUCTURE

    /                   contains the entry script and web resources
    assets/             contains the web runtime assets
    assets_b/           contains application assets such as JavaScript and CSS
    commands/           contains console commands (controllers)
    config/             contains application configurations
    controllers/        contains Web controller classes
    mail/               contains view files for e-mails
    models/             contains model classes
    runtime/            contains files generated during runtime
    tests/              contains various tests for the yii2-practical-b application
    vendor/             contains dependent 3rd-party packages
    views/              contains view files for the Web application

REQUIREMENTS

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

INSTALLATION

Install via Composer

If you do not have Composer, you may install it by following the instructions at getcomposer.org.

You can then install this project template using the following command:

php composer.phar global require "fxp/composer-asset-plugin:^1.3.1"
php composer.phar create-project --prefer-dist --stability=dev kartik-v/yii2-app-practical-b practical-b

Now you should be able to access the application through the following URL, assuming practical-b is the directory directly under the Web root.

http://localhost/practical-b

Install from an Archive File

Extract the archive file downloaded from yiiframework.com to a directory named basic that is directly under the Web root.

Set cookie validation key in config/web.php file to some random secret string:

'request' => [
    // !!! insert a secret key in the following (if it is empty) - this is required by cookie validation
    'cookieValidationKey' => '<secret random string goes here>',
],

You can then access the application through the following URL:

http://localhost/practical-b/

CONFIGURATION

Database

Edit the file config/db.php with real data, for example:

return [
    'class' => 'yii\db\Connection',
    'dsn' => 'mysql:host=localhost;dbname=yii2basic',
    'username' => 'root',
    'password' => '1234',
    'charset' => 'utf8',
];

NOTES:

• Yii won't create the database for you, this has to be done manually before you can access it.
• Check and edit the other files in the config/ directory to customize your application as required.
• Refer to the README in the tests directory for information specific to basic application tests.

TESTING

Tests are located in tests directory. They are developed with Codeception PHP Testing Framework. By default there are 3 test suites:

• unit
• functional
• acceptance

Tests can be executed by running

vendor/bin/codecept run

The command above will execute unit and functional tests. Unit tests are testing the system components, while functional tests are for testing user interaction. Acceptance tests are disabled by default as they require additional setup since they perform testing in real browser.

Running acceptance tests

To execute acceptance tests do the following:

1. Rename tests/acceptance.suite.yml.example to tests/acceptance.suite.yml to enable suite configuration

2. Replace codeception/base package in composer.json with codeception/codeception to install full featured version of Codeception

3. Update dependencies with Composer

   composer update  
   

4. Download Selenium Server and launch it:

   java -jar ~/selenium-server-standalone-x.xx.x.jar
   

   In case of using Selenium Server 3.0 with Firefox browser since v48 or Google Chrome since v53 you must download GeckoDriver or ChromeDriver and launch Selenium with it:

   # for Firefox
   java -jar -Dwebdriver.gecko.driver=~/geckodriver ~/selenium-server-standalone-3.xx.x.jar
   
   # for Google Chrome
   java -jar -Dwebdriver.chrome.driver=~/chromedriver ~/selenium-server-standalone-3.xx.x.jar
   

   As an alternative way you can use already configured Docker container with older versions of Selenium and Firefox:

   docker run --net=host selenium/standalone-firefox:2.53.0
   

5. (Optional) Create yii2_basic_tests database and update it by applying migrations if you have them.

   tests/bin/yii migrate
   

   The database configuration can be found at config/test_db.php.

6. Start web server:

   tests/bin/yii serve
   

7. Now you can run all available tests

   # run all available tests
   vendor/bin/codecept run
   
   # run acceptance tests
   vendor/bin/codecept run acceptance
   
   # run only unit and functional tests
   vendor/bin/codecept run unit,functional
   

Code coverage support

By default, code coverage is disabled in codeception.yml configuration file, you should uncomment needed rows to be able to collect code coverage. You can run your tests and collect coverage with the following command:

#collect coverage for all tests
vendor/bin/codecept run -- --coverage-html --coverage-xml

#collect coverage only for unit tests
vendor/bin/codecept run unit -- --coverage-html --coverage-xml

#collect coverage for unit and functional tests
vendor/bin/codecept run functional,unit -- --coverage-html --coverage-xml

You can see code coverage output under the tests/_output directory.