CakePHP

About the Tutorial

CakePHP is an open-source framework for PHP. It is intended to make developing,
deploying and maintaining applications much easier.

CakePHP is based on an MVC-like architecture that is both powerful and easy to grasp.
Models, Views, and Controllers guarantee a strict but natural separation of business logic
from data and presentation layers.

Audience
This tutorial is meant for web developers and students who would like to learn how to
develop websites using CakePHP. It will provide a good understanding of how to use this
framework.

Prerequisites
Before you proceed with this tutorial, we assume that you have knowledge of HTML, Core
PHP, and Advance PHP. We have used CakePHP version 3.2.7 in all the examples.

Copyright & Disclaimer

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in this tutorial, please notify us at contact@tutorialspoint.com

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Table of Contents
About the Tutorial .................................................................................................................................. i

Audience ................................................................................................................................................ i

Prerequisites .......................................................................................................................................... i

Copyright & Disclaimer ........................................................................................................................... i

Table of Contents .................................................................................................................................. ii

1. CAKEPHP — OVERVIEW ..................................................................................................... 1

CakePHP Request Cycle ......................................................................................................................... 1

2. CAKEPHP — INSTALLATION ................................................................................................ 3

3. CAKEPHP — FOLDER STRUCTURE ...................................................................................... 4

4. CAKEPHP — CONFIGURATION ........................................................................................... 6

General Configuration ........................................................................................................................... 6

Databases Configuration ....................................................................................................................... 7

5. CAKEPHP — EMAIL CONFIGURATION ................................................................................ 9

6. CAKEPHP — ROUTING...................................................................................................... 11

Connecting Routes............................................................................................................................... 11

Passed Arguments ............................................................................................................................... 13

7. CAKEPHP — GENERATING URLS ....................................................................................... 16

8. CAKEPHP — REDIRECT ROUTING ..................................................................................... 18

9. CAKEPHP — CONTROLLERS .............................................................................................. 20

AppController ...................................................................................................................................... 20

Controller Actions................................................................................................................................ 21

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Redirecting .......................................................................................................................................... 21

Loading Models ................................................................................................................................... 24

10. CAKEPHP — VIEWS .......................................................................................................... 25

View Templates ................................................................................................................................... 25

View Variables ..................................................................................................................................... 25

11. CAKEPHP — EXTENDING VIEWS ....................................................................................... 28

12. CAKEPHP ─ VIEW ELEMENTS ............................................................................................ 30

13. CAKEPHP ─ VIEW EVENTS................................................................................................. 33

14. CAKEPHP — WORKING WITH DATABASE ......................................................................... 34

Insert a Record .................................................................................................................................... 34

15. CAKEPHP ─ VIEW A RECORD ............................................................................................ 37

16. CAKEPHP — UPDATE A RECORD....................................................................................... 40

17. CAKEPHP ─ DELETE A RECORD ......................................................................................... 44

18. CAKEPHP — SERVICES ...................................................................................................... 47

Authentication .................................................................................................................................... 47

19. CAKEPHP — ERRORS & EXCEPTION HANDLING ................................................................ 52

Errors and Exception Configuration ..................................................................................................... 52

20. CAKEPHP — LOGGING ..................................................................................................... 55

21. CAKEPHP — FORM HANDLING ......................................................................................... 59

22. CAKEPHP — INTERNATIONALIZATION .............................................................................. 65

Email ................................................................................................................................................... 68

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23. CAKEPHP — SESSION MANAGEMENT .............................................................................. 73

Accessing Session Object ..................................................................................................................... 73

Writing Session Data ........................................................................................................................... 73

Reading Session Data .......................................................................................................................... 73

Delete Session Data ............................................................................................................................. 74

Destroying a Session ............................................................................................................................ 74

Renew a Session .................................................................................................................................. 75

Complete Session ................................................................................................................................ 75

24. CAKEPHP — COOKIE MANAGEMENT ............................................................................... 80

Write Cookie........................................................................................................................................ 80

Read Cookie ........................................................................................................................................ 80

Check Cookie ....................................................................................................................................... 80

Delete Cookie ...................................................................................................................................... 81

25. CAKEPHP — SECURITY ..................................................................................................... 86

Encryption and Decryption .................................................................................................................. 86

CSRF .................................................................................................................................................... 86

Security Component ............................................................................................................................ 87

26. CAKEPHP — VALIDATION ................................................................................................. 90

Validation Methods ............................................................................................................................. 90

27. CAKEPHP — CREATING VALIDATORS................................................................................ 93

Validating Data .................................................................................................................................... 93

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 1. CakePHP — Overview CakePHP

CakePHP is an open source MVC framework. It makes developing, deploying and maintaining
applications much easier. CakePHP has number of libraries to reduce the overload of most
common tasks. Following are the advantages of using CakePHP.

 Open Source

 MVC Framework

 Templating Engine

 Caching Operations

 Search Engine Friendly URLs

 Easy CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) Database Interactions.

 Libraries and Helpers

 Built-in Validation

 Localization

 Email, Cookie, Security, Session, and Request Handling Components

 View Helpers for AJAX, JavaScript, HTML Forms and More

CakePHP Request Cycle

The following illustration describes how a Request Lifecycle works:

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A typical CakePHP request cycle starts with a user requesting a page or resource in your
application. At a high level, each request goes through the following steps:

 The webserver rewrite rules direct the request to webroot/index.php.

 Your application’s autoloader and bootstrap files are executed.

 Any dispatch filters that are configured can handle the request, and optionally
generate a response.

 The dispatcher selects the appropriate controller & action based on routing rules.

 The controller’s action is called and the controller interacts with the required Models
and Components.

 The controller delegates response creation to the View to generate the output
resulting from the model data.

 The view uses Helpers and Cells to generate the response body and headers.

 The response is sent back to the client.

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 2. CakePHP – Installation CakePHP

Installing CakePHP is simple and easy. You can install it from composer or you can download
it from github — https://github.com/cakephp/cakephp/releases. We will further understand
how to install CakePHP in WampServer. After downloading it from github, extract all the files
in a folder called “CakePHP” in WampServer. You can give custom name to folder but we have
used “CakePHP”.

Make sure that the directories logs, tmp and all its subdirectories have write permission
as CakePHP uses these directories for various operations.

After extracting it, let’s check whether it has been installed correctly or not by visiting the
following URL in browser: http://localhost:85/CakePHP/

The above URL will direct you to the screen as shown below. This shows that CakePHP has
successfully been installed.

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 3. CakePHP — Folder Structure CakePHP

Take a look at the following screenshot. It shows the folder structure of CakePHP.

The following table describes the role of each folder:

Folder
Description
Name
bin The bin folder holds the Cake console executables.
The config folder holds the (few) configuration files CakePHP uses.
config Database connection details, bootstrapping, core configuration files and
more should be stored here.
The logs folder normally contains your log files, depending on your log
logs
configuration.
plugins The plugins folder is where the Plugins your application uses are stored.
The src folder will be where you work your magic: It is where your
application’s files will be placed. CakePHP’s src folder is where you will do
most of your application development. Let’s look a little closer at the
folders inside src.
 Console Contains the console commands and console tasks for your
src
application.

 Controller Contains your application’s controllers and their

components.

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 CakePHP

 Locale Stores string files for internationalization.

 Model Contains your application’s tables, entities and behaviors.

 View Presentational classes are placed here: cells, helpers, and

template files.

 Template Presentational files are placed here: elements, error

pages, layouts, and view template files.
tests The tests folder will be where you put the test cases for your application.
The tmp folder is where CakePHP stores temporary data. The actual data
it stores depends on how you have CakePHP configured, but this folder is
tmp
usually used to store model descriptions and sometimes session
information.
The vendor folder is where CakePHP and other application dependencies
vendor will be installed. Make a personal commitment not to edit files in this
folder. We can’t help you if you’ve modified the core.
The webroot directory is the public document root of your application. It
webroot
contains all the files you want to be publically reachable.

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 4. CakePHP – Configuration CakePHP

CakePHP comes with one configuration file by default and we can modify it according to our
needs. There is one dedicated folder “config” for this purpose. CakePHP comes with different
configuration options.

General Configuration
The following table describes the role of various variables and how they affect your CakePHP
application.

Variable Name Description

Changes CakePHP debugging output.

false = Production mode. No error messages, errors, or warnings
debug
shown.
true = Errors and warnings shown.
App.namespace The namespace to find app classes under.
Un-comment this definition if you don’t plan to use Apache’s
App.baseUrl mod_rewrite with CakePHP. Don’t forget to remove your
.htaccess files too.
The base directory the app resides in. If false, this will be auto
App.base
detected.
Define what encoding your application uses. This encoding is used
App.encoding to generate the charset in the layout, and encode entities. It
should match the encoding values specified for your database.
App.webroot The webroot directory.
App.wwwRoot The file path to webroot.
The fully qualified domain name (including protocol) to your
App.fullBaseUrl
application’s root.
App.imageBaseUrl Web path to the public images directory under webroot.
App.cssBaseUrl Web path to the public css directory under webroot.
App.jsBaseUrl Web path to the public js directory under webroot.
Configure paths for non-class based resources. Supports the
App.paths plugins, templates, locales subkeys, which allow the definition
of paths for plugins, view templates and locale files respectively.
A random string used in hashing. This value is also used as the
Security.salt
HMAC salt when doing symmetric encryption.
Appends a timestamp which is last modified time of the particular
file at the end of asset files URLs (CSS, JavaScript, Image) when
using proper helpers. Valid values:
Asset.timestamp  (bool) false - Doesn’t do anything (default)

 (bool) true - Appends the timestamp when debug is true

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 (string) ‘force’ - Always appends the timestamp

Databases Configuration
Database can be configured in config/app.php file. This file contains a default connection
with provided parameters which can be modified as per our choice. The below screenshot
shows the default parameters and values which should be modified as per the requirement.

Let’s understand each parameter in detail:

Key Description

The fully namespaced class name of the class that represents the
connection to a database server. This class is responsible for
className
loading the database driver, providing SQL transaction
mechanisms and preparing SQL statements among other things.
The class name of the driver used to implements all specificities
for a database engine. This can either be a short classname using
driver plugin syntax, a fully namespaced name, or a constructed driver
instance. Examples of short classnames are Mysql, Sqlite,
Postgres, and Sqlserver.
persistent Whether or not to use a persistent connection to the database.
host The database server’s hostname (or IP address).
username Database username
password Database password
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 CakePHP

database Name of Database

port (optional) The TCP port or Unix socket used to connect to the server.
Indicates the character set to use when sending SQL statements
encoding
to the server like ‘utf8’ etc.
timezone Server timezone to set.
Used in PostgreSQL database setups to specify which schema to
schema
use.
Used by drivers that support it to connect via Unix socket files. If
unix_socket you are using PostgreSQL and want to use Unix sockets, leave
the host key blank.
ssl_key The file path to the SSL key file. (Only supported by MySQL).
The file path to the SSL certificate file. (Only supported by
ssl_cert
MySQL).
The file path to the SSL certificate authority. (Only supported by
ssl_ca
MySQL).
A list of queries that should be sent to the database server as
init
when the connection is created.
Set to true to enable query logging. When enabled queries will be
log
logged at a debug level with the queriesLog scope.
Set to true if you are using reserved words or special characters
in your table or column names. Enabling this setting will result in
quoteIdentifiers
queries built using the Query Builder having identifiers quoted
when creating SQL. It decreases performance.
An associative array of PDO constants that should be passed to
flags
the underlying PDO instance.
Either boolean true, or a string containing the cache configuration
cacheMetadata to store meta data in. Having metadata caching disable is not
advised and can result in very poor performance.

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 5. CakePHP – Email Configuration CakePHP

Email can be configured in file config/app.php. It is not required to define email

configuration in config/app.php. Email can be used without it; just use the respective methods
to set all configurations separately or load an array of configs. Configuration for Email defaults
is created using config() and configTransport().

Email Configuration Transport

By defining transports separately from delivery profiles, you can easily re-use transport
configuration across multiple profiles. You can specify multiple configurations for production,
development and testing. Each transport needs a className. Valid options are as follows:

 Mail — Send using PHP mail function


 Smtp — Send using SMTP

 Debug — Do not send the email, just return the result

You can add custom transports (or override existing transports) by adding the appropriate
file to src/Mailer/Transport. Transports should be named YourTransport.php, where
'Your' is the name of the transport. Following is the example of Email configuration transport.

Example
'EmailTransport' => [
'default' => [
'className' => 'Mail',
// The following keys are used in SMTP transports
'host' => 'localhost',
'port' => 25,
'timeout' => 30,
'username' => 'user',
'password' => 'secret',
'client' => null,
'tls' => null,
'url' => env('EMAIL_TRANSPORT_DEFAULT_URL', null),
],
],

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Email Delivery Profiles

Delivery profiles allow you to predefine various properties about email messages from your
application and give the settings a name. This saves duplication across your application and
makes maintenance and development easier. Each profile accepts a number of keys. Following
is an example of Email delivery profiles.

Example
'Email' => [
'default' => [
'transport' => 'default',
'from' => 'you@localhost',
],
],

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