Getting started

This page is about the first steps in using Kiwa. How to install it and run a simple website.

Table of contents

Installation

Kiwa is made for the use with Composer. Be sure to get it at first.

Use your CLI and Composer to create a new website by running:

$ composer create-project kiwa/website-skeleton my-project

Change my-project by your needs.

Move to your project directory, for example, by running:

$ cd my-project

Create your code repository, for example, by running:

$ git init

By running the installation, a lot of basic files will be created. Those files can be committed to your repository.

Running the website

To access the website from public, point your domain to the public directory, so the index.php will be used.

To run the website in a local environment, run

$ php -S 127.0.0.1:8000 public/index.php

If you have the Kiwa Console installed, run

$ php bin/console server:start

Open http://127.0.0.1:8000 in your browser then.

Adding the Kiwa Console

The Kiwa Console is a useful helper to manage your website. If you don't have it installed yet, add it to your project by running 

$ composer require kiwa/console

The console is now available and can be used over the CLI. Take a look at the available commands by running 

$ php bin/console

Adding a new page

Let's use the Kiwa Console to create a new page. At first, run 

$ php bin/console page:create

The CLI will ask for the page name. The page name will be part of the URL later. Let's write test-page here and press Enter ↵.

Now the Console asks if we want to root that URL to a phtml file with the same name. That's okay, so confirm it.

After that, we're getting asked about the page type. We want to define it as website what is the default value here and press Enter ↵ again to confirm.

For our first page, we don't want a second level subpage, so we deny the next question by again pressing Enter ↵.

Now the Console asks if the page shall have dynamic subpages. We don't want that here in our example, so we deny the question again by pressing Enter ↵.

After that, the Console asks for the language code. We write en here and confirm.

Here comes the SEO part: The next question is about the page title, and we enter Test Page. After that, the Console asks for the description: let's write Description for our Test Page.

Now comes the last question: Do we want to add another language? At the moment, we don't want so, so let's deny the question by pressing Enter ↵.

We're finished! The Console tells that it has created the page test-page and we notice some changes in our project now:

  • The html folder contains a file test-page.phtml

  • In our config/config.php there is a new part of code. It looks like that:

    <?php

// ...

$configGenerator = new ConfigGenerator();
$configGenerator
    // ...
    ->addPage(PageGenerator::create()
        ->setLanguageCode('en')
        ->setName('test-page')
        ->setPageTitle('Test Page')
        ->setOGTitle('Test Page')
        ->setOGDescription('Description for our Test Page')
        ->setDescription('Description for our Test Page')
        ->setPageType('website')
        ->setFile('test-page')
    )
;

return $configGenerator->getConfig();

And for sure, the page is already available to access it by a request. Open in your browser http://127.0.0.1:8000/test-page.html and you will see the welcome message that says Welcome to page test-page!.