CakePHP Application Skeleton

An application skeleton for creating applications with CakePHP 5.x. and tailwind

The framework source code can be found here: cakephp/cakephp.

Requierements

1. PHP >= 8.1
2. NodeJS ^20.19.0 || >=22.12.0
3. NPM >=8.0.0

Installation

1. Download Composer or update composer self-update.
2. Run php composer.phar create-project --prefer-dist cakephp/app-tailwind [app_name].

If Composer is installed globally, run

composer create-project --prefer-dist cakephp/app-tailwind myapp

To use the latest commit:

composer create-project cakephp/app-tailwind tailwind -s dev

Next, install tailwind and vite with npm:

npm install

Running a development server

You can run both a PHP development server, and tailwind with on-demand rebuilds using:

bin/cake devserver

Then visit http://localhost:8765 to see the welcome page. If you already have a webserver that supports PHP, you can run the tailwind compiler on its own with:

npm run dev

Building for production

To build CSS assets for production, use:

npm run build

Bake templates

This application skeleton contains a bake templates and helper templates that produce HTML using tailwind utility classes. You can and should adapt these templates to fit the needs of your application.

Demo app

Check out the 5.x-demo branch, which contains demo migrations and a seeder. See the README on how to get it running.

Update

Since this skeleton is a starting point for your application and various files would have been modified as per your needs, there isn't a way to provide automated upgrades, so you have to do any updates manually.

Configuration

Read and edit the environment specific config/app_local.php and set up the 'Datasources' and any other configuration relevant for your application. Other environment agnostic settings can be changed in config/app.php.