Demo: Install CodeIgniter 4 manually without composer
As with its predecessor, CodeIgniter 3, we can use the manual installation of the framework, which consists of downloading a tablet from the official page:
In the download section.
Click where it says "Download" for CodeIgniter 4; this will start the download process of the framework which is in a compressed .zip. We unzip it, give the folder a better name and place it anywhere, in this book it will be in a folder on the desktop:
C:\Users\acy\Desktop\proyectos\codeigniter\codeigniter4In the course the project will be called as "codeigniter4", and that is the structure we have.
This option is ideal for doing some testing with the framework; but in the end, if we get used to working with Composer, we can both create the project and update it and perform the various tasks that Composer allows us; With Composer, we have a more direct way with fewer steps to do the tasks outlined above.
As you can see in the previous image, we already have Composer enabled in this project to be able to work; however, by default the project does not work with Composer...
I know this may seem confusing, but when you compare it with the project that we will create in the next section with Composer, you will see that a folder is missing... for this option, the manual installation option, you will see that there is a folder called system, which is where find the core of our framework; although we execute composer commands like:
$ composer updateAnd the vendor folder is generated, with all the dependencies, our project will still point to the system folder; therefore, we would have to make extra adaptations to our project so that it works through Composer and with this, all the advantages that this manager offers us; but it would not make any sense, since, if we want to use Composer, the best thing we can do is create the project from scratch with Composer.
In conclusion, this option is recommended to do some tests with the framework and nothing else, since we do not have a direct way to work with Composer and what this implies is the impossibility -or in the best of cases- complications to update and install PHP dependencies. Since, if we want to extend the framework with libraries for PHP or update the framework, we are greatly limited and we can easily solve both limitations if we use Composer.
- Andrés Cruz
Develop with Laravel, Django, Flask, CodeIgniter, HTML5, CSS3, MySQL, JavaScript, Vue, Android, iOS, Flutter