Justin Hartman

Justin Hartman

Justin Hartman is a South African entreprenuer who has been innovating in the digital landscape for more than seventeen years. Having pioneered and spearheaded a number of great businesses; Social Code and Afrigator, Justin Hartman is a true digital visionary.

Written on: Updated on:

The following Howto will install CakePHP and get you up and running using XAMPP on Mac OS X 10.7.5+.

This guide is a series of terminal commands that will:

  1. Install the latest version of Composer.
  2. Move the composer phar file to the XAMPP bin directory.
  3. Install the latest version of CakePHP.

Minimum Requirements

I have successfully tested the installation using the following package versions:

  • Mac OS X 10.7.5
  • XAMPP 5.6.30-0
  • Composer 1.4.1

Earlier versions of the above software may indeed work however I have not tested them so YMMV.

Getting Composer

Open up a terminal window and run the following shell commands. This will download the composer setup file, verify the installer is valid and create the packaged composer.phar file.

Download and Build

$ /Applications/XAMPP/bin/php -r "copy('https://getcomposer.org/installer', 'composer-setup.php');"
$ /Applications/XAMPP/bin/php -r "if (hash_file('SHA384', 'composer-setup.php') === '669656bab3166a7aff8a7506b8cb2d1c292f042046c5a994c43155c0be6190fa0355160742ab2e1c88d40d5be660b410') { echo 'Installer verified'; } else { echo 'Installer corrupt'; unlink('composer-setup.php'); } echo PHP_EOL;"
$ /Applications/XAMPP/bin/php composer-setup.php
$ /Applications/XAMPP/bin/php -r "unlink('composer-setup.php');"

Moving things around

Once you see the Installer Verified message output in your terminal window you can then run the following command.

$ mv composer.phar /Applications/XAMPP/bin/composer
$ alias composer='/Applications/XAMPP/bin/composer/composer.phar'

This command moves the composer.phar file to the XAMPP bin directory so that you can access it from a centralised location within XAMPP. The alias command makes composer available globally. It is useful to move it as you may want or need to install other packages via Composer.

You will now be able to run composer at the following location:

$ /Applications/XAMPP/bin/composer/composer.phar

or simply run:

$ composer

Setting up a CakePHP project

By default Composer will install the most current version of CakePHP that works with the PHP version in XAMPP. I did not want to run PHP 7 so I chose to download XAMPP using PHP version 5.6.30. Running PHP 5 or 7 really won’t matter to installing CakePHP; either version will work.

Working Directory

XAMPP serves website files from the htdocs folder so you will need to ensure that you are in the correct path before installing CakePHP.

In the terminal window run the following command to navigate to the htdocs folder.

$ cd /Applications/XAMPP/xamppfiles/htdocs

Install CakePHP

Finally we are now ready to install CakePHP. You can do this by running the following command in your terminal window.

$ /Applications/XAMPP/bin/php composer create-project --prefer-dist helloworld/app helloworld

Very Important: In the above command you need to replace helloworld with the name of the project you are setting up.

Once the command has run you will now have a new folder in the htdocs folder. You can now fire-up the site in your browser.

Comments