greggoforth.net | Installing CodeIgniter Above the Root

One of the really beautiful things about CodeIgniter is the ability to run multiple sites on one installation of the CodeIgniter code base. This article give you a breif example of how to accomplish this.

To begin, download the most current version of CodeIgniter. As of this writing, the current version is 1.7.0. In a typical installation, you will find a system folder (which contains all the brains of CI as well as the application folder, where you will store your files.), the user guide folder, the license, and the index.php. What we are going to do is alter the structure in a way that will allow you to reference one code base (system folder) from many installs of your custom code (controllers, models, views...anything you will find in the application folder). Follow the steps below (NOTE: you will need access to directories above the web root.)

Steps to Install CodeIgniter above the root

Cut the application folder out of the system folder and paste is somewhere you can remember (lets say the desktop for now)
Log into your web server (I use WinSCP for this) and navigate to a directory above your web root and create a folder to hold your CI system folder. (On my server I call this /ci/)
Copy your entire system folder (the one without the application folder...remember, we cut that out in step 1) to this directory. This directory should now look something like "/ci/system1.7.0"
Now, copy the application folder (the one we pasted to the desktop) to the web root of the site you are installing. Along with this, copy your index.php as well as license.txt.
The final step is to alter your index.php file to point to your newly installed codebase. Open index.php in your favorite text editor (I'm a Dreamweaver fan....i know i know...boo) and find this line:
```
$system_folder = "system";
```
Change this line to be the path to your your installation, in the example above I would change it to:
```
$system_folder = "/ci/system1.7.0";
```

Now browse to the root of your codeigniter site and you should be seeing your welcome controller. Now, all future installs of CodeIgniter all you will need to do is install the application folder and the index.php. It's that simple!

Please feel free to leave comments is I've missed something.

Comments

2-12-10 @ 06:02 PM

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6-11-09 @ 03:12 AM

Greg writes...

Hi Carula,

I apologize for my delayed response, I'm in the middle of launching a company so I haven't been doing much blogging. I am not positive about moving the application folder above the root. I will do some searching and see if I can't find something out on this. My gut feeling is that you should be able to do it, you just need to specify in the index.php where to find the application folder. There may be other complications, but I think this should work.

6-03-09 @ 05:46 PM

Anonymous writes...

Ooops.
In my question above I did of course mean the database.php file in the config folder.

6-03-09 @ 05:32 PM

carula writes...

Thanx for the pointer. Just in case anyone is having problems getting the path to work, on my host I need to use
/home/me/public_html/ci/
rather than your short version.
Also, do you know if there is anyway of moving the application/config.php file above the root as this would add an extra level of security. I never like having my database connection info in a plain text file which is accessible to the world should PHP go down for any reason.
Ciao