Mastering Yii

Table of Contents

Mastering Yii

Credits

About the Author

About the Reviewer

www.PacktPub.com

Support files, eBooks, discount offers, and more

Why subscribe?

Free access for Packt account holders

Preface

What this book covers

What you need for this book

Who this book is for

Conventions

Reader feedback

Customer support

Downloading the example code

Errata

Piracy

Questions

1. Composer, Configuration, Classes, and Path Aliases

Composer

Configuration

Requirements checker

Entry scripts

Web entry script

Configuration files

Web and console configuration files

Database configuration

Parameter configuration

Environment configuration

Setting up our application environment

Setting the web environment for NGINX

Setting the web environment for Apache

Components and objects

Components

Objects

Path aliases

Summary

2. Console Commands and Applications

Configuration and usage

Entry script

Configuration

Setting the console environment

Running console commands

Built-in console commands

The help command

The asset command

The cache command

The fixture command

The Gii command

The message command

The migration command

Creating console commands

Generating help information

Passing command-line arguments

Exit codes

Formatting

Summary

3. Migrations, DAO, and Query Building

Connecting to databases

Additional configuration options

Writing database migrations

An overview of schema

Writing migrations

Running migrations

Altering a database schema

Database access objects

Querying for data

Quoting table and column names

Executing queries

Parameter binding

Transactions

Query Builder

Query construction methods

The select method

The from method

The where method

The string format

The hash format

The operator format

Ordering results

Limiting and offsetting data

Grouping and having

Joins and unions

Executing queries

Examining queries

Iterating over query results

Data providers and data widgets

Data replication and load balancing

Summary

4. Active Record, Models, and Forms

Configuring Gii

Gii for web applications

Gii for console applications

Active Record

The Active Record pattern

Creating Active Record classes

Creating active record classes with Gii

Using Gii's web interface

Using Gii's console interface

Working with Active Record

Model validation rules

Adding custom validators

Customizing validator error messages

Working with validation errors

Manually executing validation rules

Model attribute labels

Active Record relationships

Using multiple database connections with Active Record

Behaviors in Active Record

Working with Active Record

Querying data

Data access

Saving data

Creating new records

Deleting data

Active Record events

Models

Model attributes

Scenarios

Forms

Generating forms with Gii

Generating forms with Gii's web interface

Generating forms with Gii's console interface

Using forms

ActiveForm and input types

Summary

5. Modules, Widgets, and Helpers

Modules

Module components

The module class structure

Controllers

Views and layouts

Registering modules

Dynamically registering modules

Bootstrapping modules

Accessing modules

Managing modules with Composer

Modules in summary

Widgets

Using widgets

Commonly used built-in widgets

Bootstrap widgets

jQuery UI widgets

Yii-specific widgets

Creating custom widgets

A summary of widgets

Helpers

The URL helper

The HTML helper

The JSON helper

The Markdown helper

Variable dumping

Inflector

FileHelper

Summary

6. Asset Management

Asset bundles

Using asset bundles

Configuration

Asset mapping

Asset types and locations

Asset options

Asset publication

Client cache management with asset bundles

Using preprocessor with asset bundles

The asset command line tool

Third-party asset tools

NodeJS

Bower

Grunt

Summary

7. Authenticating and Authorizing Users

Authentication of users

Implementing the user identity interface

Cookie-based authentication

Working with user identities

Authenticating users with forms

Authorization

Access control filters

Role-based access control

Configuring RBAC

Creating permissions and permission relationships

Custom authorization rules

Checking if a user has access to a role

Flash messages

Hashing and encryption

Hashing and verifying passwords

Data encryption and decryption

Data hashing

Summary

8. Routing, Responses, and Events

Routing

Default and catch all routes

Custom routes and URL rules

Parameterizing routes

URL suffixes

HTTP method-specific URL rules

Custom URL rule classes

Dynamic rule generation

Requests

Retrieving request parameters and data

Request headers and cookies

Retrieving client and URL information

Responses

Setting status codes

Web exceptions

Setting response headers

The response body

Redirection

The file output

Events

Event handlers

Triggering events

Class-level events

Global events

Summary

9. RESTful APIs

ActiveController

Configuring ActiveController display fields

Data serialization within responses

Disabling ActiveController actions

Customizing ActiveController actions

Authentication filters

HTTP basic authentication

Query parameter authentication

OAuth2 authentication

Composite authentication

Custom authentication filters

Action-specific authentication

Checking access

Verb filters

Cross-origin resource headers

Rate Limiting

Error handling

Custom API controllers

Returning data

Response Formatting

Summary

10. Testing with Codeception

Reasons for testing

How to approach testing

Testing manually

Testing a few core components

Test-driven development

Configuring Codeception with Yii2

Unit testing

Generating unit tests

Unit test examples

Testing User model methods

Functional testing

Setting up functional tests

Generating functional tests

Examples of functional tests

Acceptance testing

Setting up acceptance testing

Examples of acceptance tests

Fixtures

Creating fixtures

Defining fixtures

Using fixtures in unit tests

Automatic change testing

Summary

11. Internationalization and Localization

Configuring Yii2 and PHP

The intl extension

The application language

Programmatically setting the application language

Dynamically setting the application language

Message translations

Message sources

Default translations

Framework messages

Handling missing translations

Generating message files

Message formatting

Viewing file translations

Module translations

Widget translations

Summary

12. Performance and Security

Caching

Caching data

Caching dependencies

Database query caching

Fragment caching

Page caching

HTTP caching

Caching database schema

General performance enhancements

Enabling OPCache

Optimizing Composer dependencies

Upgrading to PHP 7

Switch to Facebook's HHVM

Security considerations

Certificates

Cookies

Protecting against cross-site scripting

Enabling cross-site request forgery protection

Summary

13. Debugging and Deploying

Debugging

Logging

Benchmarking

Error handling

Handling errors within non HTML responses

Debugging with the Yii2 debug extension

Deploying

Summary

Index

Mastering Yii

Mastering Yii

Copyright © 2016 Packt Publishing

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles or reviews.

Every effort has been made in the preparation of this book to ensure the accuracy of the information presented. However, the information contained in this book is sold without warranty, either express or implied. Neither the author, nor Packt Publishing, and its dealers and distributors will be held liable for any damages caused or alleged to be caused directly or indirectly by this book.

Packt Publishing has endeavored to provide trademark information about all of the companies and products mentioned in this book by the appropriate use of capitals. However, Packt Publishing cannot guarantee the accuracy of this information.

First published: January 2016

Production reference: 1210116

Published by Packt Publishing Ltd.

Livery Place

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Birmingham B3 2PB, UK.

ISBN 978-1-78588-242-5

www.packtpub.com

Credits

Author

Charles R. Portwood II

Reviewer

Tomasz Trejderowski

Acquisition Editor

Divya Poojari

Content Development Editor

Anish Dhurat

Technical Editor

Edwin Moses

Copy Editor

Stuti Srivastava

Project Coordinator

Bijal Patel

Proofreader

Safis Editing

Indexer

Priya Sane

Production Coordinator

Shantanu N. Zagade

Cover Work

Shantanu N. Zagade

About the Author

Charles R. Portwood II has over 10 years of experience developing modern web applications and is well versed in integrating PHP with native mobile applications. An avid proponent of Yii Framework and open source software, Charles has contributed multiple guides, extensions, and applications to the Yii community. In addition to being a programmer, he is also a Linux system administrator.

About the Reviewer

Tomasz Trejderowski is a middle-aged developer from Poland who has hands-on experience working with many programming languages and in diverse IT-related areas. He has been programming computers since the very first Commodore 64 and thus, he poses over 20 years of software development experience. You can access repositories and contributions on his GitHub profile, at http://github.com/trejder.

He is a full-time business analyst and free-time PhoneGap/Yii2 developer and blogger. He is also a mobile market entrepreneur, constantly working on some innovative projects. For more information, visit his company website at http://www.gaman.pl or his blog network at http://www.acrid.pl/.

He is a happy husband of his wonderful wife and father of two beautiful daughters.

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Preface

Yii Framework 2 (Yii2) is the successor to the popular Yii framework. Like its successor, Yii2 is an open source, high-performance rapid development framework designed to create modern, scalable, and performant web applications and APIs.

Designed for both developers with no exposure to Yii and Yii2 and for Yii framework developers looking to become experts with Yii2, this book will serve as your guide to becoming a master of Yii. From initialization and configuration to debugging and deployment, this book will be your guide to becoming a master of all aspects of this powerful framework.

What this book covers

Chapter 1, Composer, Configuration, Classes, and Path Aliases, covers the basics of a Yii2 application. In this chapter, you'll learn the core conventions of Yii2 and how to configure it as a multi-environment application. You'll also discover how to use Composer, a dependency management tool for managing your applications' software dependencies.

Chapter 2, Console Commands and Applications, focuses on how to use the built-in Yii2 console commands as it guides you through creating your own commands.

Chapter 3, Migrations, DAO, and Query Building, teaches you how to create migrations in Yii2 and how to interact with your database using database access objects (DAO) and how to use Yii2's query builder.

Chapter 4, Active Record, Models, and Forms, teaches you how to create and use Active Record to effortlessly interact with a database. Furthermore, you'll also discover how to create models to represent information not stored in databases and how to create web forms based upon Active Record models and normal models.

Chapter 5, Modules, Widgets, and Helpers, covers how to incorporate modules inside of our application. This chapter will also cover how to create and use dynamic widgets and will additionally cover Yii2's powerful helper classes.

Chapter 6, Asset Management, focuses on how to create and manage our assets using asset bundles and how to manage our assets using the asset command. This chapter also covers several strategies to build and generate our asset library using powerful tools such as Node Package Manage and Bower.

Chapter 7, Authenticating and Authorizing Users, teaches you how to verify the authenticity of users in Yii2 using several common authentication schemes (such as OAuth authentication, basic HTTP authentication, and header authentication) as well as shows you how to grant them access to specific sections of your applications.

Chapter 8, Routing, Responses, and Events, focuses on how Yii2's routing and response classes work in Yii2. In this chapter, we'll cover how to handle data both in and out of our application and discover how to tap into Yii2's powerful event system.

Chapter 9, RESTful APIs, talks about how to quickly and effortlessly extend your application with a RESTful JSON and XML API using Yii2's ActiveController class.

Chapter 10, Testing with Codeception, helps you learn how to create unit, functional, and acceptance tests for your applications using a powerful testing tool called Codeception. In this chapter, you'll also learn how to create fixtures to represent your data for testing purposes.

Chapter 11, Internationalization and Localization, covers how to localize our applications and build them to support multiple languages. Additionally, you will master how to create and manage translation files using Yii2 console commands.

Chapter 12, Performance and Security, covers many ways to improve the performance of your Yii2 application and how to keep it secure against modern day attacks on web applications.

Chapter 13, Debugging and Deploying, helps you become well-versed in how to debug your Yii2 applications using both application logging and the Yii2 debug tool. Furthermore, you will discover the fundamentals of deploying your Yii2 applications in a seamless and non-disruptive fashion.

What you need for this book

To ensure a consistent development environment and prevent unnecessary alterations to your host operation system, it is highly recommended that you run all commands within a Linux virtual machine. This will ensure that your output both in your web browser and from your command line matches the output that is presented in this book. As setting up this environment on your own can be a daunting task, prebuilt virtual machines that use VirtualBox and Vagrant are provided to make this setup process easy.

To get started with this book, you should be running the latest version of either Microsoft Windows 7, 8, 8.1 or 10, Apple OS X 10.9 or higher, or a Linux operating system that can run virtual machines, such as Ubuntu 14.04 LTS. Additionally, you will need to install the latest version of VirtualBox (available at https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads) and Vagrant (available at https://www.vagrantup.com/downloads.html).

Note

After installing these software dependencies, you may need to restart your computer for the changes to take effect.

After installing VirtualBox and Vagrant, you can then create a new dedicated development environment by opening a new command line or terminal window, creating a new directory for the chapter, and then running the following command to create your virtual machine development environment. These commands will download a prebuilt virtual machine containing all the software required to get you started and start your new development environment:

vagrant init charlesportwoodii/php56_trusty64 vagrant up --provider virtualbox vagrant ssh

Note

More information on this specific Vagrant box can be found at https://atlas.hashicorp.com/charlesportwoodii/boxes/php56_trusty64.

Note that if you are on Windows, you may need a tool such as PuTTy to connect to your virtual machine over SSH. More information on how to connect to your new virtual machine over SSH on Windows can be found at http://docs-v1.vagrantup.com/v1/docs/getting-started/ssh.html.

Once your new Vagrant box has started, you can access the files of this virtual machine over SSH and access your webroot directory by opening a new browser window and navigating to http://localhost:8080. By default, when you open this web page, you will see the output of phpino().

Tip

Depending upon your operating system security settings, your computer may prompt or block you from accessing port 8080 on your computer. Ensure that you configure your firewall settings if you are facing issues and ensure that port 8080 is open on your computer and that VirtualBox can forward connections from your host operating system to your guest operating system.

As Yii2 is fully compatible with PHP7, it is strongly suggested that you develop and test your web applications against PHP7 as well. The following commands will allow you to provision a PHP7 Vagrant box:

vagrant init charlesportwoodii/php7_trusty64 vagrant up --provider virtualbox vagrant ssh

Tip

As these virtual machines automatically configure port forwarding, it is recommended that you only run a single virtual machine at a time. Refer to the Vagrant documentation for a complete list of commands and configuration options at https://docs.vagrantup.com/v2.

Who this book is for

Mastering Yii is for intermediate to experienced software developers who want to quickly master Yii2. This book assumes some familiarity with PHP 5, HTML5, and rudimentary software development practices and methodologies.

Conventions

In this book, you will find a number of text styles that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles and an explanation of their meaning.

Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: This script tells Composer that when the create-project command is run, it should run the postCreateProject static function.

A block of code is set as follows:

scripts: {

    post-create-project-cmd: [

        yii\\composer\\Installer::postCreateProject

    ]

}

When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:

// Define our application_env variable as provided by nginx/apache if (!defined('APPLICATION_ENV')) {     if (getenv('APPLICATION_ENV') != false)         define('APPLICATION_ENV', getenv('APPLICATION_ENV'));     else       define('APPLICATION_ENV', 'prod'); }

$env = require(__DIR__ . '/config/env.php');

Any command-line input or output is written as follows:

$ ./yii fixture/load $ ./yii fixture/unload

New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, for example, in menus or dialog boxes, appear in the text like this: Once we have specified all the necessary attributes, we can click on the Preview button to preview our form, and then we can click on the Generate button to generate the source code.

Note

Warnings or important notes appear in a box like this.

Tip

Tips and tricks appear like this.

Reader feedback

Feedback from our readers is always welcome. Let us know what you think about this book—what you liked or disliked. Reader feedback is important for us as it helps us develop titles that you will really get the most out of.

To send us general feedback, simply e-mail <feedback@packtpub.com>, and mention the book's title in the subject of your message.

If there is a topic that you have expertise in and you are interested in either writing or contributing to a book, see our author guide at www.packtpub.com/authors.

Customer support

Now that you are the proud owner of a Packt book, we have a number of things to help you to get the most from your purchase.

Downloading the example code

The latest and most up to date copies of source code for this book is maintained on the Packt website: http://www.packtpub.com and on GitHub at https://github.com/masteringyii, for each chapter where applicable.

Errata

Although we have taken every care to ensure the accuracy of our content, mistakes do happen. If you find a mistake in one of our books—maybe a mistake in the text or the code—we would be grateful if you could report this to us. By doing so, you can save other readers from frustration and help us improve subsequent versions of this book. If you find any errata, please report them by visiting http://www.packtpub.com/submit-errata, selecting your book, clicking on the Errata Submission Form link, and entering the details of your errata. Once your errata are verified, your submission will be accepted and the errata will be uploaded to our website or added to any list of existing errata under the Errata section of that title.

To view the previously submitted errata, go to https://www.packtpub.com/books/content/support and enter the name of the book in the search field. The required information will appear under the Errata section.

Piracy

Piracy of copyrighted material on the Internet is an ongoing problem across all media. At Packt, we take the protection of our copyright and licenses very seriously. If you come across any illegal copies of our works in any form on the Internet, please provide us with the location address or website name immediately so that we can pursue a remedy.

Please contact us at <copyright@packtpub.com> with a link to the suspected pirated material.

We appreciate your help in protecting our authors and our ability to bring you valuable content.

Questions

If you have a problem with any aspect of this book, you can contact us at <questions@packtpub.com>, and we will do our best to address the problem.

Chapter 1. Composer, Configuration, Classes, and Path Aliases

Before diving into Yii Framework 2, we need to take a look at how it is installed, how it is configured, and what the core building blocks of the framework are. In this chapter, we'll go over how to install the framework itself and prebuilt applications via a package management tool called Composer. We'll also cover some common configurations of both Yii Framework 2 and our web server, including making our applications aware of the environment they are running on and responding appropriately to that environment.

Note

The most common ways to reference Yii Framework 2 are Yii Framework 2, YF2, and Yii2. We'll be using these terms interchangeably throughout the book.

Composer

There are several different ways to install Yii2, ranging from downloading the framework from source control (typically, from GitHub at https://github.com/yiisoft/yii2) to using a package manager such as Composer. With modern web applications, Composer is the preferred method to install Yii2 as it enables us to install, update, and manage all dependencies and extensions for our application in an automated fashion. Additionally, using Composer, we can ensure that Yii Framework 2 is kept up to date with the latest security and bug fixes. Composer can be installed by following the instructions on https://getcomposer.org. Typically, this process looks as follows:

curl -sS https://getcomposer.org/installer | php

Alternatively, if you don't have cURL available on your system, it can be installed through PHP itself:

php -r readfile('https://getcomposer.org/installer'); | php

Once installed, we should move Composer to a more centralized directory so that we can call it from any directory on our system. Installing Composer from a centralized directory rather than on a per-project basis has several advantages:

It can be called anywhere from any project. When working with multiple projects, we can ensure that we use the same dependency manager each time and for every project.

In a centralized directory, Composer only needs to be updated once rather than in every project we are working on.

Dependency managers are rarely considered code that should be pushed to your DCVS repository. Keeping the composer.phar file out of your repository reduces the amount of code you need to commit and push and ensures that your source code remains isolated from your package manager code.

By installing Composer from a centralized directory, we can ensure that Composer is always available, which saves us a step each time we clone a project that depends on Composer.

A good directory to move Composer to is /usr/local/bin, as shown in the following example:

mv composer.phar /usr/local/bin/composer chmod a+x /usr/local/bin/composer

Tip

Throughout this book, we'll be using Unix-style commands when referencing command-line arguments. Consequently, some commands may not work on Windows. If you decide to set up a Windows environment, you might need to use Composer-Setup.exe (available at https://getcomposer.org/Composer-Setup.exe) to get Composer configured for your system. If you have any issues getting Composer to run on your system, ensure that you check out the Composer documentation available at https://getcomposer.org/doc/.

Alternatively, if you have Composer installed on your system already, ensure that you update it to the latest version by running this:

composer self-update

Tip

The commands that we use through this book are based on the assumption that you have sufficient privileges to run them. On Unix-like systems, you may need to preface some commands with sudo in order to execute the command with a high permissions set. Alternatively if you are running these commands on Windows, you should ensure that you are running the listed commands in a command prompt that has elevated privileges. Ensure that you follow best practices when using sudo and when using elevated command prompts in order to ensure your system stays secure.

Once Composer is installed, we'll need to install a global plugin called The Composer Asset Plugin (available at https://github.com/francoispluchino/composer-asset-plugin). This plugin enables Composer to manage asset files for us without the need to install additional software (these programs are Bower, an asset dependency manager created by Twitter, and Node Package Manager, or NPM, which is a JavaScript dependency manager).

composer global require fxp/composer-asset-plugin:1.0.0

Tip

Due to the GitHub API's rate limiting, during installation, Composer may ask you to enter your GitHub credentials. After entering your credentials, Composer will request a dedicated API key from GitHub that can be used for future installations. Ensure that you check out the Composer documentation at https://getcomposer.org/doc/ for more information.

With Composer installed, we can now instantiate our application. If we want to install an existing Yii2 package, we can simply run the following:

composer create-project --prefer-dist

Using the Yii2 basic app as an example, this command will look like this:

composer create-project --prefer-dist yiisoft/yii2-app-basic basic

After running the command, you should see output similar to the following:

Installing yiisoft/yii2-app-basic (2.0.6)   - Installing yiisoft/yii2-app-basic (2.0.6)     Downloading: 100% Created project in basic Loading composer repositories with package information Installing dependencies (including require-dev)   - Installing yiisoft/yii2-composer (2.0.3)   - Installing ezyang/htmlpurifier (v4.6.0)   - Installing bower-asset/jquery (2.1.4)   - Installing bower-asset/yii2-pjax (v2.0.4)   - Installing bower-asset/punycode (v1.3.2)   - Installing bower-asset/jquery.inputmask (3.1.63)   - Installing cebe/markdown (1.1.0)   - Installing yiisoft/yii2 (2.0.6)   - Installing swiftmailer/swiftmailer (v5.4.1)   - Installing yiisoft/yii2-swiftmailer (2.0.4)   - Installing yiisoft/yii2-codeception (2.0.4)   - Installing bower-asset/bootstrap (v3.3.5)   - Installing yiisoft/yii2-bootstrap (2.0.5)   - Installing yiisoft/yii2-debug (2.0.5)   - Installing bower-asset/typeahead.js (v0.10.5)