FuelPHP - Simple Web Application

Quiz

In this chapter, we will see how to create a simple application in FuelPHP framework. As discussed earlier, you know how to create a new project in Fuel. We can take an example of Employee details.

Lets start by creating a project named Employee using the following command.

oil create employee

After executing the command, an employee project is created with the following file structure −

employee 
 CHANGELOG.md 
 composer.json 
 composer.lock 
 composer.phar 
 CONTRIBUTING.md 
 fuel 
    app 
       bootstrap.php 
       cache 
       classes 
       config 
       lang 
       logs 
       migrations 
       modules 
       tasks 
       tests 
       themes 
       tmp 
       vendor 
       views 
    core 
       base56.php 
       base.php 
       bootstrap.php
       bootstrap_phpunit.php 
       classes 
       composer.json 
       config 
       CONTRIBUTING.md 
       lang 
       phpunit.xml 
       tasks 
       tests 
       vendor 
       views 
    packages 
       auth 
       email 
       oil 
       orm 
       parser 
    vendor 
        autoload.php 
        composer 
        fuelphp 
        michelf 
        monolog 
        phpseclib 
        psr 
 LICENSE.md 
 oil 
 public 
    assets 
       css 
       fonts 
       img 
       js 
    favicon.ico 
    index.php 
    web.config 
 README.md 
 TESTING.md  
42 directories, 21 files

Structure of the Application

FuelPHP framework provides a well-organized application structure. Let us check some of the important files and folders of the application.

fuel − Contains all the PHP files.
public − Contains all the assets which are directly accessed through the browser such as JavaScript, CSS, images, etc.
oil − An executable used to run command line tasks such as generating code or interactive debugging within your application. It's optional.
fuel/app/ − Contains all application-specific PHP files. It contains Models, Views, and Controllers.
fuel/core/ − This is where Fuel framework itself lives.
fuel/packages/ − Contains all fuel packages. By default, fuel will contain three packages: oil, auth, and orm. These packages will not be loaded unless you require them.
fuel/app/config/ − Contains all application-related configuration files. The main application configuration file, config.php file is located here.
fuel/app/classes/ − Contains all the application specific MVC based PHP files. It contains controllers, models, helper classes, libraries, etc.
fuel/app/classes/controller/ − Controllers are placed here.
fuel/app/classes/model/ − Models are placed here.
fuel/app/views/ − Contains view files. There are no specific naming conventions for views.

Add a Controller

As discussed earlier, FuelPHP is based on the Model-View-Controller (MVC) development pattern. MVC is a software approach that separates application logic from presentation. In MVC pattern, the controller plays an important role and every webpage in an application needs to be handled by a controller. By default, controllers are located in fuel/app/classes/controller/ folder. You can create your own Controller class here.

Move to the location fuel/app/classes/controller/ and create employee.php file. To create a new controller, just extend the Controller class provided by FuelPHP, defined as follows.

employee.php

<?php 
   class Controller_Employee extends Controller { 
      public function action_home() { 
         
         // functionality of the home page  
         echo "FuelPHP-Employee application!"; 
      } 
   }

Now, we have created an Employee Controller and added a public method, action_home, which prints a simple text.

Routing

Routing resolves the web page URI into specific controller and action. Every webpage in a FuelPHP application should go through routing before the actual execution of the controller. By default, each controller can be resolved using the following URI pattern.

<controller>/<action>

Where,

controller is the name of the controller minus namespace, employee
action is the name of the method minus action_ keyword, home

The newly created controller can be accessed by http://localhost:8080/employee/home and it will produce the following result.

Result

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