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CakePHP Folder Structure

After you’ve downloaded and extracted CakePHP, these are the files and folders you should see:

  • app
  • cake
  • vendors
  • plugins
  • .htaccess
  • index.php
  • README

You’ll notice three main folders:

  • The app folder will be where you work your magic: it’s where your application’s files will be placed.
  • The cake folder is where we’ve worked our magic. Make a personal commitment not to edit files in this folder. We can’t help you if you’ve modified the core.
  • Finally, the vendors folder is where you’ll place third-party PHP libraries you need to use with your CakePHP applications.

The App Folder

CakePHP’s app folder is where you will do most of your application development. Let’s look a little closer at the folders inside of app.

config

Holds the (few) configuration files CakePHP uses. Database connection details, bootstrapping, core configuration files and more should be stored here.

controllers

Contains your application’s controllers and their components.

libs

Contains 1st party libraries that do not come from 3rd parties or external vendors. This allows you to separate your organization’s internal libraries from vendor libraries.

locale

Stores string files for internationalization.

models

Contains your application’s models, behaviors, and datasources.

plugins

Contains plugin packages.

tmp

This is where CakePHP stores temporary data. The actual data it stores depends on how you have CakePHP configured, but this folder is usually used to store model descriptions, logs, and sometimes session information.

Make sure that this folder exists and that it is writable, otherwise the performance of your application will be severely impacted. In debug mode, CakePHP will warn you if it is not the case.

vendors

Any third-party classes or libraries should be placed here. Doing so makes them easy to access using the App::import(‘vendor’, ‘name’) function. Keen observers will note that this seems redundant, as there is also a vendors folder at the top level of our directory structure. We’ll get into the differences between the two when we discuss managing multiple applications and more complex system setups.

views

Presentational files are placed here: elements, error pages, helpers, layouts, and view files.

webroot

In a production setup, this folder should serve as the document root for your application. Folders here also serve as holding places for CSS stylesheets, images, and JavaScript files.