When you deploy a Zend Framework website to a shared host, you usually cannot change the DocumentRoot to point at the public/ folder of the website. As a result the URL to the website is now http://www.example.com/public/. This doesn't look very professional, so we'd like to remove it.
The easiest way, given a ZF project created using Zend_Tool is this:
Create /index.php
<?php
define('RUNNING_FROM_ROOT', true);
include 'public/index.php';
This uses the index.php already created by Zend_Tool and means that we don't have to change anything if we move to a VPS host where we can set the DocumentRoot directly to public/.
Create /.htaccess
SetEnv APPLICATION_ENV development
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule .* index.php
We create a .htaccess file that redirects every request to index.php. We want to do this so that no one can try and read application/configs/application.ini. Obviously, set the APPLICATION_ENV to the correct value!
Referencing public facing files
Having created a very aggressive, rewrite rule, what about CSS/JS/image files though?
Fortunately, we already have a .htaccess file in the public/ folder that correctly handles this situation. As Apache will execute the .htaccess files in the deepest directory it finds, any reference to a public facing file within the public/ folder will correctly be served.
You do have to be aware of this when referencing public facing files though and add the /public to the baseUrl yourself.
For example, you may set up your CSS file and other view settings within a Front Controller plugin like this:
class App_Controller_Plugin_View extends Zend_Controller_Plugin_Abstract
{
public function dispatchLoopStartup(Zend_Controller_Request_Abstract $request)
{
$frontController = Zend_Controller_Front::getInstance();
$view = $frontController->getParam('bootstrap')->getResource('view');
$view->doctype('XHTML1_STRICT');
$baseUrl = $request->getBaseUrl();
if (defined('RUNNING_FROM_ROOT')) {
$baseUrl .= '/public';
$frontController->setBaseUrl($baseUrl);
}
$view->headLink()->appendStylesheet($baseUrl . '/css/main.css');
$view->headLink()->appendStylesheet($baseUrl . '/css/screen.css', 'screen');
$view->headLink()->appendStylesheet($baseUrl . '/css/print.css', 'print');
}
}
(This code assumes you have added a resources.view[] = "" to your application.ini)
As we have a constant that tells us if we're running from the root, we can dynamically add the /public into the URL. If we change to a host where the DocumentRoot is set directly to the public/ folder, then we don't need to change our code.
That's it. Your Zend Framework application works nicely with shared hosts.
