Lightning PHP MVC Framework

Goal

Lightning aims to be a blazing fast and lightweight PHP MVC framework, implementing all of the most important features of a PHP framework without the fluff. Includes Vue and Twig for front-end development.

Requirements

• PHP 7.2+

Installing

1. Download or clone the repo
2. Open a command line, cd to the project directory, and run composer install
3. Rename .env.example to .env and input your server configuration and preferences
4. Run npm install and composer install
5. Import the database from the _dev folder

All settings are found in .env and should be relatively straightforward.

Features Overview

• Flexible routing system which handles clean URLs and implements a /controller/action/[optional prarameter] scheme. This can be easily configured to suit most needs.
• User account system with registration, login, "Remember Me", and "Forgot Password" functionality.
• Flash message alert system for displaying messages to users.
• Mailing system with both text/plain and HTML email support.
• Secure token generation and verification system.
• Error handler and logging system which can display better error messages than PHP on development servers, and serves custom error pages on production servers (while saving error logs).
• Robust utilities class offering methods such as SSL detection, AJAX request detection, various date/time/timezone conversions, a function to convert any string to a proper URL slug, and more.
• Templating system via Twig and a View class to help with rendering, passing in custom data, and template caching.
• HTML Purifier is included to allow only safe HTML output and prevent XSS attacks. Use Utilities::purifyOutput.
• Vue and Vue CLI for front-end coding and HMR.
• SCSS for styles.

Development Environment

1. Make sure ENVIRONMENT in .env is set to dev.
2. Open a command line and run vue ui. You will need to have Vue CLI installed (npm install -g @vue/cli if you don't have it).
3. Import the Lightning folder in Vue UI.
4. Go to Tasks->dev and click the "Run task" button.
5. Navigate to your local URL for the project (for example http://lightning.local/ or whatever you set up for it on your local server); assets will automatically be served from http://localhost:8080/ (so you don't need to go to this address) when in dev mode in .env, and the real URL when in prod.

Creating the Admin User and Accessing the Admin Interface

Since Lightning doesn't have an installer (yet), you'll need to go through the regular user registration process and set yourself as admin:

1. Go to /register and input your desired email and password
2. Go to PHPMyAdmin or your preferred database administration tool, and go to the users table.
3. Find your user and set the is_active, and is_approved columns from 0 to 1, and change the role column from 2 to 1

That's it! You can now navigate to /admin and log in.

If You Accidentally Deactivate Yourself in the Admin Section

It's possible to accidentally deactivate your own user account in the admin section by clicking on the "Deactivate User" button from the Users list. If this happens, just open the database in your preferred database administration program (such as PHPMyAdmin), and for your user row, change the deactivated column from 1 to 0.

Production Build

From the project root, run npm run build, and change ENVIRONMENT in your .env file to prod.

Framework Reference Docs

Framework Methods and Usage coming soon!