Multiple apps using one Cake installation

Why?: easier to upgrade the CakePHP libraries for more than one application.

Wanted to add note to this, not much time to edit the text, but this works if using mod_rewrite also, no changes needed to files. It should be noted this is for development install of CakePHP only, not a recommended production install, DOCROOT should always point to app/webroot in production mode. –phpnut

phpnut's more stable idea

I managed to get it to work: (Cake 0.10.0.1076_dev)

Two app folders, each working as webroot and 2 databases:

app1/

app2/

You have to edit (You don’t have to, if you are using mod_rewrite. As mentioned by phpNut):

app1/config/core.php 
app2/config/core.php

Uncomment the line if you don’t have mod_rewrite:

define ('BASE_URL', $_SERVER['SCRIPT_NAME']); 

in both files.

Now you can access these applications from:

http://www.yourdomain.com/cake/app1/

and

http://www.yourdomain.com/cake/app2/

And that’s all. IT WORKS!

Using CakePHP version: 0.10.9.2378_final, and mod_rewrite.

I had some issues with getting the above to work on my web host and its directory structure, so here the steps I did for those that may also run into problems. I should also mention that following the CakePHPManual - Setting Up CakePHP: Production Setup did help me get an idea of how the directory layout should look, although there are some minor differences (see below).

My host provider gives me a home directory and a link to my webroot, and I do not have access for changing the DocumentRoot in apache:

/usr/home/username  (Home dir)
/usr/home/username/public_html -> /usr/www/users/username  (Webroot)

By following the suggested Production setup for shared hosts in the CakePHPManual, I layed out my cake paths as follows:

/usr/home/username/cake  (Cake root - where I extracted the package)
/usr/www/users/username/ (My main site Webroot : copied contents of ~/cake/app/webroot/*)

(Created two additional cake apps...)
%cp -r ~/cake/app ~/cake/app_2
%cp -r ~/cake/app ~/cake/app_yetanotherapp

(...and set up the additional app webroots in my test environment directory.)
/usr/www/users/username/devtest/app2 (App2 : copied contents of ~/cake/app_2/webroot/*)
/usr/www/users/username/devtest/yetanotherapp (App3 : copied contents of ~/cake/app_yetanotherapp/webroot/*)

So basically I wanted a main app for my primary website, and a directory of other cake apps that I would develop and test for clients.

Without doing anything else, I tried navigating my browser to my website, and received the following error:

Fatal error: require() [function.require]: Failed opening required 'cake/bootstrap.php' (include_path='.:/usr/local/lib/php:/usr/www:/usr/www/users/') in /usr/www/users/username/index.php on line 99

The error is due to an incorrect assumption of where the ‘ROOT’ and ‘APP’ paths are in my environment (see lines 45 and 52 in ~/cake/app/webroot/index.php)...Easy enough to fix...

Inserted the following lines in the /usr/www/users/username/index.php (at the top):

define('ROOT', '/usr/home/username/cake');
define('APP_DIR', 'app');
define('CAKE_CORE_INCLUDE_PATH', '/usr/home/username/cake');

The differences from the manual are slight; I had to explicitly set the full path for ‘ROOT’, I ignored the ‘WEBROOT_DIR’ define (as it gave more errors), and added the ‘CAKE_CORE_INCLUDE_PATH’ in order for cake to find its base files.

For the other apps’ index.php files, I added the above defines but changed the ‘APP_DIR’ name from ‘app’ to their respective ~/cake/{app_name}:

# For /usr/www/users/username/devtest/app2/index.php
define('APP_DIR', 'app_2');

# For /usr/www/users/username/devtest/yetanotherapp/index.php
define('APP_DIR', 'app_yetanotherapp');

...and now when I navigate to my website and test apps, it all works beautifully.

Adding additional applications is trivial, and if I need to update my cake release I can do so by overwriting my ~/cake directory. -cgmartin