fire : CodeIgniter code generator

This little script lets you generate controllers and models very easily in your codeigniter-based app.

NOTE: Right now, fire is not compatible with Windows; I am working on that and will release an OS-agnostic version as soon as possible.

Installation

The first thing to do is to make sure that php is in you $PATH. On OS X, assuming that you are using MAMP, here are the steps:

Open one of the following files in your favourite text editor: .bash_profile, .bashrc or .zshrc depending on the shell you are using and add the following line at the bottom of the file:

PATH=Applications/MAMP/bin/php/php5.4.4/bin:$PATH

Depending on the version of MAMP you are using the path to the bin directory may change.

On Windows 7, from the Desktop, right-click on Computer, then click on Advanced system settings in the sidebar and click on Environment Variables... at the bottm of the window that appeared. In the System variables section, scroll down to find the Path variable, double-click on that and append the path to the directory where the php executable lives. Note that paths are separated by a ;. If you're using XAMPP then your Path variable should look similar to this now:

...;C:\xampp\php

Next, download fire and put it somewhere safe. Now, you need to add an alias to fire. In OS X, add this line to your .bash_profile, .bashrc or .zshrc:

alias fire="php path/to/fire/fire"

Note that path/to/fire/fire is the path to the fire executable that comes with fire, not the fire directory itself.

On Windows, you can either follow the same steps if you can a Unix environment installed (eg: Cygwin) or you can follow the steps in this link to do something similar: http://superuser.com/a/49194/10801

Basic usage

Fire works out of the box, all you have to do is open a terminal window and get going. Here are some examples:

Create a new CodeIgniter project

fire new myproject

This command will clone the latest stable version from Github (from this repository) in the current folder and remove the git repository so that you can have a fresh start. NOTE: absolute paths are not supported yet.

If you don't want to clone CodeIgniter everytime you create a new project run the following command:

fire bootstrap

This will clone the CodeIgniter project in the same folder as fire. The next time you run the fire new command, it will copy the local version of CodeIgniter instead of cloning it.

Finally, you can specify which Github repository to clone from. To do this, open the config/new_project.ini file in the fire folder and replace "EllisLab/CodeIgniter" by any other repository. NOTE: You need to use the same form, ie: username/repo or organisation/repo.

Create a controller

fire generate controller posts index show new edit delete

This command will create a posts controller in the controllers folder and will add the index, show, new, edit and delete actions to it. It will also create a posts_helper helper, a views folder for the controller and views for each action.

If you don't specify a name for the controller you want to create, fire will ask you to enter one!

fire g controller

This will also create a controller. Notice that the g alias is available to the lazy people out there too!

You can also create nested controllers, that is, controllers inside subfolders:

fire g controller admin/users index

This will create the admin folder in the controllers, helpers and the views folders if they don't exits.

Finally, you can specify the --parent option along with the name of a class to change the parent controller.

Create views

If you generated a blank controller with fire and added actions to it later on, or if you created a controller manually and can't be bothered to create a view for each action manually, fire lets you generate views for those actions! All you have to do is to call the views generator with the name of the controller in question:

fire g views users

This will generate a view for each public action in the users controller. NOTE: Actions that start with an underscore (_) are not considered public.

You can limit the views generation by giving a list of views to generate. NOTE: By doing this, you can force the generation of views for non-public actions:

fire g views users index show

This code snippet will only generate views for the listed actions, namely: index and show.

Create a model

fire g model post title:string body:text created_at:datetime updated_at:datetime

This command will create a post model in the models folder. It will also create a migration which add a title field as VARCHAR, a body field as TEXT, etc.

Same principle for the model, no need to a name:

fire g model

This will also create a model, however the user will be asked to enter a name. NOTE: When creating a model, the migration_version configuration will be incremented by one in application/config/migration.php.

You can also create nested models, that is, models inside subfolders:

fire g model admin/user name:string

Finally, you can specify the --parent option along with the name of a class to change the parent model. You can also specify the --parent-migration option to chage the parent of the migration class.

Here is list of valid field types that fire accepts:

• string: translates to VARCHAR(255) NOT NULL
• varchar: translates to VARCHAR(255) NOT NULL
• text: translates to TEXT
• int: translates to INT(10) UNSIGNED NOT NULL
• integer: translates to INT(10) UNSIGNED NOT NULL
• decimal: translates to DECIMAL(10, 0) UNSIGNED NOT NULL
• date: translates to DATE
• datetime: translates to DATETIME
• char: translates to CHAR
• bool: translates to TINYINT(3) UNSIGNED NOT NULL
• boolean: translates to TINYINT(3) UNSIGNED NOT NULL

Create a migration

fire g migration add_author_to_posts author:string

This command will generate a blank migration with the name add_author_to_posts.php, prepended by the migration number of course!

In a future release the migration's content will be generated according to the name of the migration.

Finally, you can specify the --parent-migration option along with the name of a class to change the parent migration.

Migrate the database

Fire lets you migrate and rollback the database, but first, you need to setup your database config in application/config/database.php and you need to run the following command:

 fire migrate install

You can now migrate and rollback the database from the command line without any efforts:

fire migrate
fire migrate rollback

Integration with WebFire

Fire can install its web-based stand-alone version, WebFire. One command is available to do just that:

fire web install

Changelog

NOTE: For all the new changes, check the git commits please.

08/10/2010

• Bug fix: double equal instead of just one (author: Erik Jansson)

03/20/2010

• New query syntax to add actions, methods and view files.
• View files!
• Models and view files can now be generated automatically.
• Project generation now works perfectly!
• Fixed lots of bugs.
• A lot of things that you won't notice when using the script but that made the code cleaner and easier to maintain.

03/13/2010

• New feature: Create new CodeIgniter projects (Work in progress - Additional features coming soon).
• Updated: Removed all the references to the source of the errors/warning in the message outputs that use user sees.

03/02/2010

• New feature: Create multiple controllers/models at a time.
• New feature: Add public/private actions/methods to new controllers/models.
• Updated: Better notification system.
• Soon: Create new CodeIgniter projects.

Contributors

• Erik Jansson