Using Yeoman with PHP

08 Apr 2013

This is a simple workaround to use yeoman with PHP projects. For this I assume that you have a basic knowledge of yeoman and already setup yeoman, grunt, node, bower and php.

For this tutorial I used

  • Yeoman 1.0.0-beta.3
  • Ubuntu 11.04
  • php-cgi 5.3.5-1

Initiate yeoman webapp

For this tutorial I started with initialize a new project with yeoman webapp generator, which is shipped along with yeoman.

To start with a fresh project, create a directory named yeoman-php and cd into it. Now boilerplate the webapp with yeoman. After that install the npm packages and bower components. You can check whether everything works fine by running grunt.

Ok! Now we need to customize the project in order to execute php file.

Installing PHP-CGI

In order to work this, You need to install php-cgi in your machine. If you are using ubuntu you can use the following command


Execute CGI scripts 

To execute the php scripts we use gateway package as the connect middleware. Thanks to fgnass for creating the package. 

You need to install this node package and add the same to your package.json file.

 The above command will install the package and add the same into package.json (devDependencies).

Using custom middleware

In order to use the custom middleware we need to update the Gruntfile. Add the below code to top of your Gruntfile.js.

Now add the following to the livereload, middleware settings in connect. Make sure you add on top of both mountFolder already exists.

Now add the .php extenstion to livereload files, so that change in grunt will reload the php files everytime you change anything.

Now rename the index.html to index.php and try executing grunt server.

You can look into the github commit for the whole set of changes required for this.
A demo project is available on github.


Currently I updated only for connect/livereload tasks.
I am working on updating it for build, usemin and other tasks. 


Looking forward for your comments.
Thanks.
If you find my work helpful, You can buy me a coffee.