How do I run/use the Yii command line tool ?

Question

What EXACTLY do I do to run the "Yiic Command line tool"

Open my reg CMD? double click on a certain file?

In the screen cast the tut tells you were going to need to use the Yii command line tool and then the screen instantly cuts to a command line that has some yii related text

My spidey sense is telling me that the answer to this question is going to probably be incredibly obvious and simple , but ive done a decent amount of searching and even if I figure it out I still think this question should be in the books because I know I cant be the only one whos never used a command line tool/was confused about this.

Answer 1

Only started using windows again recently but there should be a yiic.bat located in the framework directory of wherever you extracted yii. You will need to either append this location to your PATH variable or cd into the directory when you want to run yiic. You will also need php installed.

Hope this helps

Some links:

• http://www.yiiframework.com/doc/guide/1.1/en/quickstart.first-app
• http://www.php.net/manual/en/install.windows.installer.msi.php
• http://geekswithblogs.net/renso/archive/2009/10/21/how-to-set-the-windows-path-in-windows-7.aspx

Have just had a quick go myself and seems to work, steps were:

• downloaded & installed wamp http://sourceforge.net/projects/wampserver/
• watched this vid http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rra_UKJRagA
• downloaded yii http://www.yiiframework.com/download/
• created a frameworks dir in wamp root as in vid and extracted yii to it
• edited the yiic.bat to point to the php executable in wamp
• opened CMD cd'd to the dir containing yiic.bat and typed "yiic webapp foo"
• pressed return and got 'correct response from CMD'

shame the video doesn't have sound but thanks xibian for sharing :-)

Answer 2

If you dont like command-line tools, you can use Gii

http://www.yiiframework.com/doc/guide/1.1/en/topics.gii

Starting from version 1.1.2, Yii is equipped with a Web-based code generation tool called Gii. It supercedes the previous yiic shell generation tool which runs on command line. In this section, we will describe how to use Gii and how to extend Gii to increase our development productivity.