Where should assets go in a CodeIgniter project?

I hate having so many directories at the root level, so I use /public and use htaccess to rewrite /scripts to /public/scripts and so on.


Personally, I rip the application directory out of the system directory and make it a sibling to system. I then create a project directory in public_html (www) where I move index.php and store my public assets.

Let's assume the project you're working on is called projekt. In the parent directory to public_html (www) create a directory called CISYSTEM, and inside that directory create a directory from the version you're using, 202, 210 etc.

/CISYSTEM
    /202
    /210
    /another_CI_version
/projekt_application
    /models
    /views
    /controllers
    /private_assets
/public_html
    /projekt
        index.php
        .htaccess
        css
        img
        js
        lib

The beauty of this directory structure is it adds another layer of security and makes it dead-easy to upgrade/swap out your CI core. Plus, you're not supposed to make changes to the core - having a single directory where your core is stored and having all projects reference it keeps things DRY.

All this directory shuffling requires you to reroute a few things though. Luckily, CodeIgniter makes it easy -- all changes can be made in the index.php file.

Open index.php and reroute a couple things:

Change: $system_path = 'system';

To: $system_path = '../../CISYSTEM/210';

Change: $application_folder = 'application';

To: $application_folder = '../../projekt_application';

Also, I see a lot of people talking about using site_url() in the other answers. I recommend a less verbose way of using site_url()... you don't have to call it every time if you make use of HTML's <base> element:

<base href="<?= site_url();?>">

Just include that in your application's <head> and you can call your controllers directly... as in:

<a href='controllername/functionname'>Some Action</a>

Cheers


I usually put separate folders at the root level, so I end up with a directory structure like this:

/system
/css
/js
/img

Seems to work for me - when you use site_url(url), the URL it generates is from the root, so you can use site_url('css/file.css') to generate URLs to your stylesheets etc.


I find it best to keep the assets on the root level. You can use <?=base_url()?> to echo the full root of the site. In the config file, you set up the root of the website. This statement just echoes that out.

Because of this, you can use includes like this: 

<link href="<?=base_url()?>/css/style.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />

anywhere in your code, and it will still get http://example.com/css/style.css.

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