Getting Started

First, install Silk via PEAR. While Silk is in heavy development, packages are being built nightly, so you should always be fairly up to date.

$ pear channel-discover pear.silkframework.com
$ pear install silk/silk-alpha

Note: You have have to sudo these commands depending on your configuration

Installing the PEAR package should install a command line app, called silk into the proper place in your path. When run with no parameters, it displays a list of valid commands.

$ silk
(in /Users/tedkulp/web)
config:env    Command for quickly changing config files for various environments
create        Command for creating new apps
migrate       Run migrations automatically for models
test          Command for running phpunit

To create a new Silk application, just run the create command and give it a new directory name.

$ silk create newapp
(in /Users/tedkulp/web)

Creating application newapp using skeleton in /usr/local/PEAR/silk/skeleton/default.

Now look to see what it created.

$ cd newapp
$ ls
README.txt app        config     public     test       tmp

Next, edit the config.php file to taste. Mainly, you'll want to set the database connection string. The default config is fairly documented and should be pretty self explanatory as far as getting your database working correctly.

Now you'll need to point a virtual host at the public directory. While you can point the server to the root, it will require some additional configuration (to be determined) in order to have things work correctly. By pointing a virtual host directly to public, everything will work correctly.

If you point your browser to your new virtual host, you'll see the default index page. Remove public/index.html and you can begin to build your application.