I recently installed CakePHP on my hosted web but couldn't get it to work quite right. After a few hours mucking around I've managed to get what I think is the correct installation. Please feel free to comment and correct me where I have made mistakes.

My hosting service allows me to publish multiple websites/domains on the one account. They have FTP access to upload the websites and each website/domain appears as a separate directory off the root directory.


/
  /site1.com
     site1_files.htm
  /site2.com
     site2_files.htm
  /site3.com
     site3_files.htm


My original installation was to simply unzip the CakePHP files to my new site. The result was something like:


/
  /site1.com
     site1_files.htm
  /site2.com
     site2_files.htm
  /site3.com
     site3_files.htm
  /site4.com
     /cake
        /config
        /console
        /libs
        /tests
        basics.php
        bootstrap.php
        dispatcher.php
     /app
        /config
        /controllers
        /models
        /tests
        /tmp
        /vendors
        /webroot
            /css
            /files
            /img
            /js
            .htaccess
            index.php
        .htaccess
        index.php
     .htaccess
     index.php
     

I have not listed all files and directories here but you get the idea...

This is not the recommended installation for a production environment and I couldn't get the mod_rewrites working correctly. My webhost doesn't allow the DocumentRoot to be changed in the .htaccess file nor via the CPanel. I raised the issue with the Live Chat customer support (using the term loosely) but they were unable to help. I had to raise a job ticket and they would decide if it was in their interest to change the DocumentRoot for my site.

After re-reading the installation instructions for CakePHP I went for the Advanced installation and decided to break the directory structure throughout my working directory. I moved the 'app', 'cake' and 'vendors' directories and contents into the root directory. I deleted the .htaccess and index.php files from the site4.com directory (i.e the first level). I moved the contents of the 'webroot' directory into the site4.com directory and then deleted the empty webroot directory. I also changed the name of my 'app' directory to 'site4app', this allows me to run multiple cake apps from the one server, one cake app for each domain.

This is the resulting structure:


/
  /cake
     /config
     /console
     /libs
     /tests
     basics.php
     bootstrap.php
     dispatcher.php
  /site4app
     /config
     /controllers
     /models
     /tests
     /tmp
     /vendors
     .htaccess
     index.php
  /site1.com
     site1_files.htm
  /site2.com
     site2_files.htm
  /site3.com
     site3_files.htm
  /site4.com
     /css
     /files
     /img
     /js
     .htaccess
     index.php
  /vendors
     /css
     /js

I then had to edit the index.php file in the site4.com directory (the old app/webroot directory) to point to the 'cake' and 'app' (now called site4app) directories. The CPanel of my account listed the actual directory of my site4.com domain as /hsphere/local/home/my_account_name/site4.com. Therefore I had to change;
ROOT to look at /hsphere/local/home/my_account_name
APP_DIR to look at /hsphere/local/home/my_account_name/site4app
CAKE_CORE_INCLUDE_PATH to look at /hsphere/local/home/my_account_name/cake

ROOT = /hsphere/local/home/my_account_name, APP_DIR = site4app, and CAKE_CORE_INCLUDE_PATH = /hsphere/local/home/my_account_name. The web document root has already been set in the CPanel settings from my web host as /hsphere/local/home/my_account_name/site4.com and therefore doesn't need to be set anywhere in cakephp.

The section below is what the relevant section in my index.php file looks like.

/**
 * The full path to the directory which holds "app", WITHOUT a trailing DS.
 *
 */
    if (!defined('ROOT')) {
        define('ROOT', DS.'hsphere'.DS.'local'.DS.'home'.DS.'my_account_name');
    }
/**
 * The actual directory name for the "app".
 *
 */
    if (!defined('APP_DIR')) {
        define('APP_DIR', 'site4app');
    }
/**
 * The absolute path to the "cake" directory, WITHOUT a trailing DS.
 *
 */
    if (!defined('CAKE_CORE_INCLUDE_PATH')) {
        define('CAKE_CORE_INCLUDE_PATH', DS.'hsphere'.DS.'local'.DS.'home'.DS.'my_account_name');
    }

/**

I used the standarf .htaccess file in the site4.com directory (the old webroot) so it would load the correct page when someone went to www.site4.com. Anyway, mine looks like this:



<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>     
  RewriteEngine On
  RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
  RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
  RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /index.php?url=$1 [QSA,L]
</IfModule> 


I went to www.site4.com and it was all working. Nice! There was only one problem, I was getting the session ID appended to the URL. The advice of setting the "php_flag session.trans_id off" only caused a web server error.

To fix the problem I changed a setting in the core.php file in the site4app/config (old app/config) directory. Change the session.save value from 'php' to 'cake'. It's about line 104 in my file.

  Configure::write('Session.save', 'cake');

Now when I loaded the page at www.site4.com it displayed some errors. This turned out to be due to a missing directory. I went to site4app/tmp (old app/tmp) directory and created a directory called 'sessions'. Loaded the page again... and..... bingo. No errors.

I hope this method also works for you. Good luck.