Managing your Applications

By default, it is assumed that you only intend to use CodeIgniter to manage one application, which you will build in your application directory. It is possible, however, to have multiple sets of applications that share a single CodeIgniter installation, or even to rename or relocate your application directory.

Renaming or Relocating the Application Directory

If you would like to rename your application directory or even move it to a different location on your server, other than your project root, open your main app/Config/Paths.php and set a full server path in the $appDirectory variable (at about line 38):

public $appDirectory = '/path/to/your/application';

You will need to modify two additional files in your project root, so that they can find the Paths configuration file:

• /spark runs command line apps; the path is specified on or about line 36:

  require 'app/Config/Paths.php';
  // ^^^ Change this if you move your application folder
  

• /public/index.php is the front controller for your webapp; the config path is specified on or about line 16:

  $pathsPath = FCPATH . '../app/Config/Paths.php';
  // ^^^ Change this if you move your application folder
  

Running Multiple Applications with one CodeIgniter Installation

If you would like to share a common CodeIgniter framework installation, to manage several different applications, simply put all of the directories located inside your application directory into their own (sub)-directory.

For example, let’s say you want to create two applications, named “foo” and “bar”. You could structure your application project directories like this:

/foo
    /app
    /public
    /tests
    /writable
/bar
    /app
    /public
    /tests
    /writable
/codeigniter
    /system
    /docs

This would have two apps, “foo” and “bar”, both having standard application directories and a public folder, and sharing a common codeigniter framework.

The index.php inside each application would refer to its own configuration, ../app/Config/Paths.php, and the $systemDirectory variable inside each of those would be set to refer to the shared common “system” folder.

If either of the applications had a command-line component, then you would also modify spark inside each application’s project folder, as directed above.