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Deployment

Once your application is complete, or even before that you'll want to deploy it. There are a few things you should do when deploying a CakePHP application.

Check your security

If you're throwing your application out into the wild, it's a good idea to make sure it doesn't have any leaks. Check the :doc:`/core-libraries/components/security-component` to guard against CSRF attacks, form field tampering, and others. Doing :doc:`/models/data-validation`, and/or :doc:`/core-utility-libraries/sanitize` is also a great idea, for protecting your database and also against XSS attacks. Check that only your webroot directory is publicly visible, and that your secrets (such as your app salt and any security keys) are private and unique as well!

Set document root

Setting the document root correctly on your application is an important step to keeping your code secure and your application safer. CakePHP applications should have the document root set to the application's app/webroot. This makes the application and configuration files inaccessible through a URL. Setting the document root is different for different webservers. See the :doc:`/installation/url-rewriting` documentation for webserver specific information.

In all cases you will want to set the virtual host/domain's document to be app/webroot/. This removes the possibility of files outside of the webroot directory being executed.

Update core.php

Updating core.php, specifically the value of debug is extremely important. Turning debug = 0 disables a number of development features that should never be exposed to the Internet at large. Disabling debug changes the following types of things:

  • Debug messages, created with :php:func:`pr()` and :php:func:`debug()` are disabled.
  • Core CakePHP caches are by default flushed every 999 days, instead of every 10 seconds as in development.
  • Error views are less informative, and give generic error messages instead.
  • Errors are not displayed.
  • Exception stack traces are disabled.

In addition to the above, many plugins and application extensions use debug to modify their behavior.

You can check against an environment variable to set the debug level dynamically between environments. This will avoid deploying an application with debug > 0 and also save yourself from having to change the debug level each time before deploying to a production environment.

For example, you can set an environment variable in your Apache configuration:

SetEnv CAKEPHP_DEBUG 2

And then you can set the debug level dynamically in core.php:

if (getenv('CAKEPHP_DEBUG')) {
        Configure::write('debug', 2);
} else {
        Configure::write('debug', 0);
}

Improve your application's performance

Since handling static assets, such as images, JavaScript and CSS files of plugins, through the Dispatcher is incredibly inefficient, it is strongly recommended to symlink them for production. For example like this:

ln -s app/Plugin/YourPlugin/webroot/css/yourplugin.css app/webroot/css/yourplugin.css