Requirements

Web Server

You need a web server to run your app, preferably running on your local machine (you do all of your development locally, right, right??). As PHP, the framework itself runs just fine on most popular web servers. Setup guides are available for Apache, IIS, Lighttpd, and NGINX.

PHP

Because the framework takes advantage of advanced language features, a recent PHP version is required. Please review the compatibility table to see if your PHP version is supported.

The vanilla PHP configuration should be in general fine. However its always good to double check that certain configuration options are set correctly. Certain features are not supported as we consider those broken, very experimental or a hack.

Please verify that:

  • Magic Quotes are disabled.
  • Register Globals are disabled.
  • Function overloading is disabled when using the mbstring extension.
  • PHP isn't compiled with curlwrappers.
  • Short Open Tags are disabled. Although this is not a strict requirement.
  • When using MongoDB you have the mongo extension >= 1.2.0 installed.

While you're making PHP configuration changes, you might also consider having PHP display errors temporarily during development. Just change the relevant lines in your php.ini:

; Show me teh errors.
display_errors = On

; Either choose to see all errors or all, but no deprecation warnings.
error_reporting = E_ALL
; error_reporting = E_ALL & ~E_DEPRECATED

Data Store

Applications often feature some sort of data store. As such, you may want to track down one of the following as well:

  • MongoDB
  • MySQL or MariaDB
  • PostgreSQL
  • SQLite
  • CouchDB

Version Control System

While not absolutely essential, a working knowledge of the Git version control system is useful for most aspects of development in general, and li3 specifically i.e. the workflow for contributing to projects is Git-based.

Command-line Terminal

Also not required for working with the framework, however it provides many useful tools for automating complex or repetitive tasks.

Passion!

... for innovation and collaboration.