Creating your own Application structure

Note: This section is under development.

While the basic and advanced project templates are great for most of your needs, you may want to create your own project template with which to start your projects.

Project templates in Yii are simply repositories containing a composer.json file, and registered as a Composer package. Any repository can be identified as a Composer package, making it installable via create-project Composer command.

Since it's a bit too much to start building your entire template from scratch, it is better to use one of the built-in templates as a base. Let's use the basic template here.

Clone the Basic Template

The first step is to clone the basic Yii template's Git repository:

git clone [email protected]:yiisoft/yii2-app-basic.git

Then wait for the repository to be downloaded to your computer. Since the changes made to the template won't be pushed back, you can delete the .git directory and all of its contents from the download.

Modify the Files

Next, you'll want to modify the composer.json to reflect your template. Change the name, description, keywords, homepage, license, and support values to describe your new template. Also adjust the require, require-dev, suggest, and other options to match your template's requirements.

Note: In the composer.json file, use the writable parameter under extra to specify per file permissions to be set after an application is created using the template.

Next, actually modify the structure and contents of the application as you would like the default to be. Finally, update the README file to be applicable to your template.

Make a Package

With the template defined, create a Git repository from it, and push your files there. If you're going to open source your template, Github is the best place to host it. If you intend to keep your template non-collaborative, any Git repository site will do.

Next, you need to register your package for Composer's sake. For public templates, the package should be registered at Packagist. For private templates, it is a bit more tricky to register the package. For instructions, see the Composer documentation.

Use the Template

That's all that's required to create a new Yii project template. Now you can create projects using your template:

composer create-project --prefer-dist --stability=dev mysoft/yii2-app-coolone new-project