Install the Smarty library files which are in the /libs/ sub directory of the distribution. These are .php files that you SHOULD NOT edit. They are shared among all applications and only get changed when you upgrade to a new version of Smarty.
In the examples below the Smarty tarball has been unpacked to:
/usr/local/lib/Smarty-v.e.r/ for *nix machines
and c:\webroot\libs\Smarty-v.e.r\ for the windows enviroment.
Smarty uses a PHP constant named SMARTY_DIR which is the full system file path to the Smarty libs/ directory. Basically, if your application can find the Smarty.class.php file, you do not need to set the SMARTY_DIR as Smarty will figure it out on its own. Therefore, if Smarty.class.php is not in your include_path, or you do not supply an absolute path to it in your application, then you must define SMARTY_DIR manually. SMARTY_DIR must include a trailing slash/.
Here's how you create an instance of Smarty in your PHP scripts:
<?php |
Try running the above script. If you get an error saying the Smarty.class.php file could not be found, you need to do one of the following:
Example 2-4. Add the library path to the php.ini file
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Example 2-5. Appending the include path in a php script with ini_set()
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Now that the library files are in place, it's time to setup the Smarty directories for your application:
Smarty requires four directories which are by default named templates/, templates_c/, configs/ and cache/
Each of these are definable by the Smarty class properties $template_dir, $compile_dir, $config_dir, and $cache_dir respectively
It is highly recommended that you setup a separate set of these directories for each application that will use Smarty
For our installation example, we will be setting up the Smarty environment for a guest book application. We picked an application only for the purpose of a directory naming convention. You can use the same environment for any application, just replace guestbook/ with the name of your application.
Be sure that you know the location of your web server's document root as a file path. In the following examples, the document root is /web/www.example.com/guestbook/htdocs/. The Smarty directories are only accessed by the Smarty library and never accessed directly by the web browser. Therefore to avoid any security concerns, it is recommended (but not mandatory) to place these directories outside of the web server's document root.
You will need as least one file under your document root, and that is the script accessed by the web browser. We will name our script index.php, and place it in a subdirectory under the document root /htdocs/.
Smarty will need write access (windows users please ignore) to the $compile_dir and $cache_dir directories (templates_c/ and cache/), so be sure the web server user account can write to them.
Note: This is usually user "nobody" and group "nobody". For OS X users, the default is user "www" and group "www". If you are using Apache, you can look in your httpd.conf file to see what user and group are being used.
Note: chmod 770 will be fairly tight security, it only allows user "nobody" and group "nobody" read/write access to the directories. If you would like to open up read access to anyone (mostly for your own convenience of viewing these files), you can use 775 instead.
We need to create the index.tpl file that Smarty will display. This needs to be located in the $template_dir.
Technical Note: {* Smarty *} is a template comment. It is not required, but it is good practice to start all your template files with this comment. It makes the file easy to recognize regardless of the file extension. For example, text editors could recognize the file and turn on special syntax highlighting.
Now lets edit index.php. We'll create an instance of Smarty, assign() a template variable and display() the index.tpl file.
Example 2-9. Editing /web/www.example.com/docs/guestbook/index.php
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Note: In our example, we are setting absolute paths to all of the Smarty directories. If /web/www.example.com/guestbook/ is within your PHP include_path, then these settings are not necessary. However, it is more efficient and (from experience) less error-prone to set them to absolute paths. This ensures that Smarty is getting files from the directories you intended.
Now naviagate to the index.php file with the web browser. You should see "Hello Ned, welcome to Smarty!"
You have completed the basic setup for Smarty!