Introduction

Frontcontroller receives all incoming requests, and allows you to route these to various modules.

For each route (url), you can specify a module to handle the request.

Example modules:

• Twig: CMS / Template renderer
• File: serve static files (images, css, js, etc)
• Redirect: respond with different types of redirect headers
• ReverseProxy: Pass requests on to backend servers
• ... etc

It's easy to add new modules that can handle new types of requests

Installation

Install dependencies

composer install

Starting server in development mode

# use `cd` to go to the frontcontroller base directory. i.e. cd ~/git/frontcontroller
export FRONTCONTROLLER_BASEPATH=/my/frontcontroller/website/
php -d variables_order=EGPCS -t web -S 0.0.0.0:54321 web/index.php

Now open localhost:54321 in your browser.

Troubleshooting

No images / scripts / assets using PHP built-in server

You need to explicitly add web/index.php to your startup command, otherwise the built-in server won't support files with . characters in them.

Auto-generation of Apache config

It is possible to generate Apache config files by using the command line tool. The tool supports Apache config file generation for OSX and Debian/Ubuntu.

sudo app/console frontcontroller:apacheconf [path_to_website_root_dir] [path_to_web_root] [--hackhosts]

Note:

• The [path_to_web_root] is optional. If not specified, it uses the web directory of this repo. If specified, [path_to_web_root] is a symlink to the web directory.
• In the websites' frontcontroller.yml file, it's needed to add host: example.com to make it work.
• On OSX, you need to manually include the new config file in ```/etc/apache2/httpd.conf
• On Debian/Ubuntu, you need to symlink the new config file in /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/
• If the option --hackhosts is passed, it also hacks the /etc/hosts file to add hosts specified in the hosts.yml file in the website directory. This is useful for development locally. Actually, it also doesn't hurt to use --hackhosts in prod environment.

Examples:

# local dev:
sudo app/console frontcontroller:apacheconf [path_to_website_root_dir] --hackhosts
# prod:
sudo app/console frontcontroller:apacheconf [path_to_website_root_dir] [path_to_web_root]