Install lithium php framework

Question

I'm a long time codeigniter framework user, and I love how you can just download it, extract and upload to your server via ftp and that's it, ready to go.

Now, I'm curious to try lithium framework, but oh my, command prompts, shell access, github... That's out of my scope, plus I dont have shell access to my host.

Do I really need all that? Can I not just download it, extract and upload via ftp?

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

Not sure what you mean, the lithium framework has a direct link to their download: http://sourceforge.net/projects/li3/files/

Or you can go to github and click on ZIP : https://github.com/UnionOfRAD/lithium

Answer 2

@Wyck and @Tomen have it right, shell access helps as does git(hub)...but it's optional.

Here's a quick tutorial to get lithium up and running without shell access or command prompts:

1. Read the docs! Seriously, just browse the quickstart to get a feel for lithium
2. Create a directory in your web root (/var/www/newsite, c:\\inetpub\\wwwroot\\newsite, whatever applies to your situation)
3. Download the sample lithium app . This is really just an empty boilerplate app
4. Extract the sample lithium app into your new website root. Your website root should look like this:
5. Download the lithium framework and extract it into /libraries/lithium/. Example:

The rest is up to you. You'll have to configure your database connections, bootstrap, etc.. on your own.

Answer 3

There is no official comment on this. Usually it is expected that you have shell access. But from a short look on my docs i can say the following:

You will not need shell access if:

• You have FTP access
• The basic setup of your web server corresponds to that expected by lithium. For example: Apache 2 + mod_rewrite enabled + PHP 5.3

This should give you the basic functionality of Lithium. If you want to use data sources like MongoDB or CouchDB, thats a different story and you would have to check if your server already supports these. If not, you would need shell access to install and configure them appropriately.