If you want to install Cakephp 3 on your VPS running on Nginx Server you can follow these simple setup. 

Setup CakePHP 3 on Nginx server

Step 1. To install Cakephp 3 first you need to install  composer. You can download composer file from official website.  After downloading composer.phar file you can move that file to run your composer globally

sudo mv composer.phar /usr/local/bin/composer

Step 2. Once you successfully install composer you run below command to setup CakePHP 3 on your server.

composer self-update && composer create-project --prefer-dist cakephp/app app_name

Setup CakePHP 3 on Nginx server

After running this command if you find and error or killed exception you can clear composer cache using below command

sudo rm -R ~/.composer

Step 3. If Cake is installed successfully you can open browser and type your URL and check. Now we need to set Rewrite Rules for CakePHP 3 to make it work properly. To do this you need to open your site configuration setting using below command.

sudo nano /etc/nginx/sites-available/default

After enter this command hit entre a config file is open in terminal you need to add location if you are installing Cake in sub directory or not then you need to enter below expression in main location / line 

location /test {
   // If not in sub directory then paste bellow line in main location /{}         
   rewrite ^/test(.+)$ /test/webroot$1 break;
   try_files $uri $uri/ /test/index.php$is_args$args;
}

I am installing my application in sub directory so i define test in expression you can replace test with name you give to your project.

Step 4. If everything okay you can restart your server

sudo service nginx reload

And after this refresh your page if configuration file setting is okay your css and webroot folder is accessible That’s it 🙂 . 

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