Cobalt Engine

Cobalt Engine is meant to provide developers with a simple and powerful router-based web development frontend. It's compatible with Docker and easily deployed.

Cobalt aims to provide an all-in-one framework which includes

• An expressive HTML template engine
• Robust user account management and permission system
• A unified routing system for both the backend and frontend
• Frontend WebComponents for easily interacting with the API
• A CLI for managing settings, user accounts, CRON tasks, and more
• Route contexts for HTML content, RESTful APIs, webhooks, and more

It was created by Heavy Element, Inc.

NOTE Cobalt Engine is still in an ALPHA STATE. That means it is currently not considered stable. We are constantly adding new features, removing broken ones, and tweaking thing. If you use Cobalt in a production environment you do so at your own risk.

Getting Started

Preparation

To get started with Cobalt, you'll need at least PHP version 8.1 and MongoDB on your host system.

On Ubuntu

  sudo apt install apache2 php8.1 php-mongodb
  # Depending on your setup, you might also want MongoDB set up on your system
  sudo a2enmod rewrite

Get the Code

Decide where you want to have your files live. For the purposes of this tutorial, we'll choose /var/www/

Hint: it might be helpful for you to su into your webserver's user account to perform these operations. On Ubuntu, that would probably be www-data

Let's clone this repository and install our dependencies.

cd /var/www/
git clone https://github.com/heavyelementinc/cobalt-core.git
cd cobalt-core
composer install

If you do not have composer installed in your PATH, you can get it here.

Creating your first project

1. In your terminal, cd into your ./cobalt-core directory which you cloned in the last step.
2. Type ./core.sh project init and hit enter
   • On Windows, you will need to run php.exe ".\cli\cobalt.php" project init (untested)
3. Answer the prompts

Your new project will be created based on the answers to the CLI's questions. For this tutorial, we'll assume you named your project my-project.

Creating your first user account

1. In your terminal, cd into your project's main directory. (In this tutorial, that would be my-project)
2. Type ./core.sh user create and hit enter
   • On Windows you will need to run php.exe ".\cli\cobalt.php" user create (untested)
3. Answer the prompts
4. Alternatively, you may specify a username, password, and email address in your command:
   • ./core.sh user create username p!sswOrd123 user@example.com
     • Passwords specified in this manner cannot include spaces
   • NOTE: if you do not specify one or more of the above items, you will be prompted for them

MongoDB

If you have enabled MongoDB authentication you'll want to provide your username, password, and other details in __APP_ROOT__/config/config.php.