Yii 2.0: yii2-app-advanced on single domain (Apache, Nginx)

Introduction 

If you develop rather complex applications with Yii2, you might already be familiar with yii2-app-advanced application template. Well, the template is awesome and provides high flexibility regarding code/configuration sharing among parts of an application.

What is not obvious for this template, is how to configure a web server so that both, frontend and backend will be accessible on the same domain, like following:

• http://example.com/ - frontend
• http://example.com/backend/ - backend

Option 1: The Easy Way 

This way should work on any Unix-like OS (MacOSX, GNU/Linux, FreeBSD etc).

All you need to do is to set web server Document Root to frontend/web and inside of it create a symlink to backend/web.

Creating symlink for backend 

cd /path/to/project/frontend/web
ln -s ../../backend/web backend

Apache 

DocumentRoot directive is NOT AVAILABLE in .htaccess file context! You should edit you httpd.conf or virtual host config file. Or modify corresponding setting in the hosting configuration interface.

Also make sure that FollowSymlinks option is active for a virtual host.

Example virtual host config:

<VirtualHost *:80>
    ServerName example.com
    DocumentRoot "/path/to/project/frontend/web"
    Options +FollowSymlinks
    ...
</VirtualHost>

Nginx 

For Nginx just use official recommended configuration and remember to set root accordingly:

server {
    charset utf-8;
    client_max_body_size 128M;
 
    listen 80; ## listen for ipv4
    #listen [::]:80 default_server ipv6only=on; ## listen for ipv6
 
    server_name mysite.local;
    root        /path/to/project/frontend/web;
    index       index.php;
    ...
}

Option 2: The Hard Way 

Try this option only if the previous one does not work for you. Because any additional rewrite rules is a performance hit.

To achieve our goal, we need to slightly modify backend configuration, as well as to alter the web server's configuration.

Yii configuration 

We need to "teach" the application components request and urlManager about our intended URL structure.

Frontend

Modify file frontend/config/main.php:

....
    'components' => [
        ....
        'request'=>[
            'baseUrl'=>'',
        ],
        'urlManager'=>[
            'scriptUrl'=>'/index.php',
        ],
        // use the following, if you want to enable speaking URL for the frontend
//        'urlManager' => [
//            'enablePrettyUrl' => true,
//            'showScriptName' => false,
//        ],
    ],

Backend

Modify file backend/config/main.php:

....
    'components' => [
        ....
        'request'=>[
            'baseUrl'=>'/backend',
        ],
        'urlManager'=>[
            'scriptUrl'=>'/backend/index.php',
        ],
        // use the following, if you want to enable speaking URL for the backend
//        'urlManager' => [
//            'enablePrettyUrl' => true,
//            'showScriptName' => false,
//        ],
    ],

Apache (.htaccess with mod_rewrite) 

Create a file .htaccess in the project root directory (where composer.json is):

RewriteEngine On

# End the processing, if a rewrite already occurred
RewriteRule ^(frontend|backend)/web/ - [L]

# Handle the case of backend, skip ([S=1]) the following rule, if current matched
RewriteRule ^backend(/(.*))?$ backend/web/$2 [S=1]

# handle the case of frontend
RewriteRule .* frontend/web/$0

# Uncomment the following, if you want speaking URL
#RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
#RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
#RewriteRule ^([^/]+/web)/.*$ $1/index.php

Nginx 

Here is Nginx config, built on top of the official recommended configuration:

server {
    set $project_root /path/to/example.com;
    set $fcgi_server 127.0.0.1:9000;
    #set $fcgi_server unix:/var/run/php-fpm/example.socket;
 
    charset utf-8;
    client_max_body_size 128M;
 
    listen 80;
 
    server_name example.com;
    root $project_root/frontend/web;
    index index.php;
 
    access_log  /var/log/nginx/example.access.log combined;
    error_log  /var/log/nginx/example.error.log warn;
 
    location ^~ /backend {
        rewrite ^/backend(.*)$ /backend/web$1 last;
    }
 
    location ^~ /backend/web {
        root $project_root;
 
        # uncomment the following, if you want to enable speaking URL in the backend
        #try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php$is_args$args;
 
        location ~ /\.(ht|svn|git) {
            deny all;
        }
 
        location ~ \.php$ {
            try_files $uri =404;
            include fastcgi_params;
            fastcgi_pass $fcgi_server;
        }
    }
 
    location / {
        try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php$is_args$args;
    }
 
    location ~ /\.(ht|svn|git) {
        deny all;
    }
 
    location ~ \.php$ {
        try_files $uri =404;
        include fastcgi_params;
        fastcgi_pass $fcgi_server;
    }
}