Deployment

Once your application is complete, or even before that you'll want to deploy it. There are a few things you should do when deploying a CakePHP application.

Moving files

You are encouraged to create a git commit and pull or clone that commit or repository on your server and run composer install. While this requires some knowledge about git and an existing install of git and composer this process will take care about library dependencies and file and folder permissions.

Be aware that when deploying via FTP you will at least have to fix file and folder permissions.

You can also use this deployment technique to setup a staging- or demo-server (pre-production) and keep it in sync with your dev box.

Adjust config/app.php

Adjusting app.php, specifically the value of debug is extremely important. Turning debug = false disables a number of development features that should never be exposed to the Internet at large. Disabling debug changes the following types of things:

• Debug messages, created with pr(), debug() and dd() are disabled.
• Core CakePHP caches are by default flushed every year (about 365 days), instead of every 10 seconds as in development.
• Error views are less informative, and give generic error messages instead.
• PHP Errors are not displayed.
• Exception stack traces are disabled.

In addition to the above, many plugins and application extensions use debug to modify their behavior.

You can check against an environment variable to set the debug level dynamically between environments. This will avoid deploying an application with debug true and also save yourself from having to change the debug level each time before deploying to a production environment.

For example, you can set an environment variable in your Apache configuration:

SetEnv CAKEPHP_DEBUG 1

And then you can set the debug level dynamically in app.php:

$debug = (bool)getenv('CAKEPHP_DEBUG');

return [
    'debug' => $debug,
    .....
];

Check Your Security

If you're throwing your application out into the wild, it's a good idea to make sure it doesn't have any obvious leaks:

• Ensure you are using the Cross Site Request Forgery component or middleware.
• You may want to enable the Security component. It can help prevent several types of form tampering and reduce the possibility of mass-assignment issues.
• Ensure your models have the correct Validation rules enabled.
• Check that only your webroot directory is publicly visible, and that your secrets (such as your app salt, and any security keys) are private and unique as well.

Set Document Root

Setting the document root correctly on your application is an important step to keeping your code secure and your application safer. CakePHP applications should have the document root set to the application's webroot. This makes the application and configuration files inaccessible through a URL. Setting the document root is different for different webservers. See the Url Rewriting documentation for webserver specific information.

In all cases you will want to set the virtual host/domain's document to be webroot/. This removes the possibility of files outside of the webroot directory being executed.

Improve Your Application's Performance

Class loading can take a big share of your application's processing time. In order to avoid this problem, it is recommended that you run this command in your production server once the application is deployed:

php composer.phar dump-autoload -o

WARNING

If you are using deprecated class names in your project or plugins, don't combine this with -a/--classmap-authoritative. This breaks the class aliases. Instead, you can use the mentioned option 2b instead using --apcu as additional optimization if APCu is installed.

Since handling static assets, such as images, JavaScript and CSS files of plugins, through the Dispatcher is incredibly inefficient, it is strongly recommended to symlink them for production. This can be done by using the plugin shell:

bin/cake plugin assets symlink

The above command will symlink the webroot directory of all loaded plugins to appropriate path in the app's webroot directory.

If your filesystem doesn't allow creating symlinks the directories will be copied instead of being symlinked. You can also explicitly copy the directories using:

bin/cake plugin assets copy

Deploying an update

After deployment of an update you might also want to run bin/cake schema_cache clear, part of the Schema Cache Shell shell.