CodeIgniter is lightweight, powerful , barebones MVC PHP framework used for developing PHP website. The framework provides the basic stencil as building blocks for to deploy a website.
CodeIgniter was originally created and maintained by EllisLab and is now a project of the British Columbia Institute of Technology.
CodeIgniter is an open-source project which means you are allowed to copy, modify, and distribute the framework.
CodeIgniter comes is currently available is the following: CodeIgniter 2, CodeIgniter 3, and CodeIgniter 4.
Between CodeIgniter 2 and 3, there is no significant difference, one could migrate from CodeIgniter 2 to CodeIgniter 3 without any major structural changes.
While CodeIgniter 4 (the future of the framework) is very different compared to previous versions. CodeIgniter 4 has major changes and migrating is not as easy as before.
In this tutorial we will start our foundation for building an application that will allow us to Create, Read Update and Delete (CRUD) using CodeIgniter. With these features, we will be able to fashion our application into (almost) anything that you may be required to build.
Installing and setting up CodeIgniter 4.
To get CodeIgniter working we need to get the files installed onto your local server. There are 2 ways to achieve this:
Installing CodeIgniter 4 Manually
- Download CodeIgniter and extract the files to your project root folder. If your are using Xampp you would extract the files to C://xampp/htdocs if you are using WAMPP then extract the files to C:/wamp64/www unless you are using virtual hosts.
Installing CodeIgniter 4 using Composer
Using the command line interface CD into your project folder and run the following composer command to install CodeIgniter
composer create-project codeigniter4/appstarter --no-dev