Managing your Applications

By default, it is assumed that you only intend to use CodeIgniter to manage one application, which you will build in your app directory. It is possible, however, to have multiple sets of applications that share a single CodeIgniter installation, or even to rename or relocate your application directory.

Important

When you installed CodeIgniter v4.1.9 or before, and if there are App\\ and Config\\ namespaces in your /composer.json’s autoload.psr-4 like the following, you need to remove these lines, and run composer dump-autolod.

{
    ...
    "autoload": {
        "psr-4": {
            "App\\": "app",             <-- Remove this line
            "Config\\": "app/Config"    <-- Remove this line
        }
    },
    ...
}

Renaming or Relocating the Application Directory

If you would like to rename your application directory or even move it to a different location on your server, other than your project root, open your main app/Config/Paths.php and set a full server path in the $appDirectory variable (at about line 44):

<?php

namespace Config;

class Paths
{
    // ...

    public $appDirectory = '/path/to/your/app';

    // ...
}

You will need to modify two additional files in your project root, so that they can find the Paths configuration file:

  • /spark runs command line apps; the path is specified on or about line 49:

    <?php

$pathsConfig = 'app/Config/Paths.php';
// ^^^ Change this line if you move your application folder

  • /public/index.php is the front controller for your webapp; the config path is specified on or about line 20:

    <?php

$pathsConfig = FCPATH . '../app/Config/Paths.php';
// ^^^ Change this if you move your application folder

Running Multiple Applications with one CodeIgniter Installation

If you would like to share a common CodeIgniter framework installation, to manage several different applications, simply put all of the directories located inside your application directory into their own (sub)-directory.

For example, let’s say you want to create two applications, named foo and bar. You could structure your application project directories like this:

foo/
    app/
    public/
    tests/
    writable/
    env
    phpunit.xml.dist
    spark
bar/
    app/
    public/
    tests/
    writable/
    env
    phpunit.xml.dist
    spark
vendor/
    autoload.php
    codeigniter4/framework/
composer.json
composer.lock

Note

If you install CodeIgniter from the Zip file, the directory structure would be following:

foo/
bar/
codeigniter4/system/

This would have two apps, foo and bar, both having standard application directories and a public folder, and sharing a common codeigniter4/framework.

The $systemDirectory variable in app/Config/Paths.php inside each of those would be set to refer to the shared common codeigniter4/framework folder:

<?php

namespace Config;

class Paths
{
    // ...

    public $systemDirectory = __DIR__ . '/../../../vendor/codeigniter4/framework/system';

    // ...
}

Note

If you install CodeIgniter from the Zip file, the $systemDirectory would be __DIR__ . '/../../../codeigniter4/system'.

And modify the COMPOSER_PATH constant in app/Config/Constants.php inside each of those:

<?php

defined('COMPOSER_PATH') || define('COMPOSER_PATH', ROOTPATH . '../vendor/autoload.php');

Only when you change the Application Directory, see Renaming or Relocating the Application Directory and modify the paths in the index.php and spark.