How To Setup AbterPHP for development on Linux

Team AbterCMS
Friday, May 31, 2019

This guide should help you get up and running with AbterPHP on recent Linux distros in minutes, however this may or may not work on Linux or OSX.

Wait! What’s AbterPHP you ask? It’s just the first implementation of AbterCMS which happens to be in PHP. This is also likely the only implementation that implements both frontend and backend features.

Pre-requisites

Grab the source code

This should be fairly obvious if you’re reading it, but feel free to download the code from Github or clone the repository. Just use the “Clone or download” button to get you started.

Install docker

The recommended way of getting started with the AbterPHP is via docker. While it is not necessarily mandatory, some of the documentation might assume that all developers use docker for development. If you want to run the code, you’ll have to ensure that you have the right version of PHP, with the neccessary modules and that you have at least a supported version of MySQL (or later PostgreSQL). While having Redis or Memcached is great, those are not mandatory.

Install mkcert

Since security is a top priority, pure http is not supported out of the box, therefore you’ll need to install a certificate. The recommended way is using mkcert. While it is not necessarily mandatory, some of the documentation might assume that all developers use mkcert for development.

Installation

Basics

Open the project in a console. (The rest of the installation documentation will assume that . is the root directory of the project.)
Add abtercms.test as localhost in /etc/hosts on Linux and OSX or ??? on Windows.
```
# /etc/hosts
# [...]
127.0.0.1	abtercms.test
```
Create certificate: Since security is a top priority, you’ll need to create a certificates
```
mkcert abtercms.test "*.abtercms.test"
mv abtercms.test+1* ./docker/nginx/certs/
```

Set some permissions

chmod -R 0777 ./tmp ./public/tmp
chmod +x apex

Spin up the containers

docker-compose pull
docker-compose up -d

Install the dependencies
```
docker-compose exec make install
```

Ensure your settings are sane

Although we try to provide a reasonable set of settings for getting started quickly, at this point you may want to edit config/environment/.env.app.php to make your settings sane for your needs. Please note however that these values can be and in some cases will be overwritten by your environment variables. This means that if you are running the system with docker-compose than you might need to edit some of these values in docker-compose.yml.

Note: If you do not have the file config/environment/.env.app.php then something must have gone wrong in the previous step, because it should be created during php composer.phar install.

Install the db schema and create a new admin user

You need to log into the PHP container to do this:

docker-compose exec php ./apex migrations:up
docker-compose exec php ./apex user:create {username} {email} {strongPassword} admin en

If everything went well, you should be able to log in with your new user at https://abtercms.test/login-iddqd.