Getting Started With Helium Boilerplate

Welcome to Heliums getting started! This tutorial will take you through a boilerplate for developing a site. While the boilerplate represents one of developing your site with Helium, we recommend that you reference how completed examples here:

https://github.com/Helium-MVC/Examples

Getting Started

Our first step is to get a boilerplate version of the site onto our local computers. We recommend 2 ways of doing this.

1)Composer

With both a command line and composer, go to the directory you want the site installed and type:

composer create-project helium-mvc/helium-boilerplate site1 dev-master

That will download everything that you need to get started.

2) Manual Download

Head over to https://github.com/Helium-MVC/Boilerplate and you can manually download the site from there.

Booting The Server

Now we are ready to boot the site. We recommend either using docker or PHP 7 internal server.

Method 1 : Docker

If you are new to Docker, it is a great tool for virtualizing any server environment that you can easily share with others. If you a new to docker, head over to: https://www.docker.com/

After you have downloaded and installed docker, simply run in your site root directory:

docker-composer up

Then we are going to ssh into docker and install the site-packages:

docker exec -it helium_php bash
cd /code
composer install

Method 2: PHP7 Built-in Server

For PHP7 users, there is a built-in web server to serve PHP that can be used to launch your site. This tutorial is also assuming you have composer installed. Go to the root directory of your site and type:

composer install
php -S localhost:8000 -t site/public_html/

Navigating To Your Site

Now that your site is up and running, we simply go to the following address in your browser:

http://localhost:8000

And that’s it for getting started! Next, we are going to discuss the basics of controllers and views here: https://medium.com/helium-mvc/helium-mvc-routing-controller-and-views-b04874b536ed