Separate CodeIgniter public folder

Question

I\'ve been trying to change my CodeIgniter file structure to make it safer and cleaner but I can\'t get it to work. I want to separate the application/system and the public

Answer 1

For CodeIgniter 3.x, the correct way to approach this (at this point in 2018 and after) is as follows:

• Make a public folder in your root folder
• MOVE your index.php file into this folder (to prevent ambiguity)
• inside the moved index.php file, change the following:

  change $system_path to ../system

  change $application_folder to ../application

Now, we need an .htaccess file, but CI 3.x doesn't have a .htaccess file by default, soo.. how about stealing it from CI 4.x which has it by default? You can find it here:

https://github.com/bcit-ci/CodeIgniter4/blob/develop/public/.htaccess

I recommend you NOT include the line SetEnv CI_ENVIRONMENT development - instead, define this in your apache or NGinx .conf file so the .htaccess file can work anywhere.

Finally, you'll meed to update your .conf file so that DOCUMENT_ROOT is set to the subfolder named public (or whatever you chose to name it). Then restart Apache/Nginx.

That should give you the same results, and be much more secure.

-- UPDATE -- I found that I had problems with the .htaccess file from CI 4, however suspect it's my system that's the problem. This simple version did work however:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond $1 !^(index\.php|assets|images|js|css|uploads|favicon.png)
RewriteCond %(REQUEST_FILENAME) !-f
RewriteCond %(REQUEST_FILENAME) !-d
RewriteRule ^(.*)$  ./index.php/$1 [L]