Installation
CakePHP is fast and easy to install. The minimum requirements are a webserver and a copy of Cake, that’s
it! While this manual focuses primarily on setting up with Apache (because it’s the most common), you can
configure Cake to run on a variety of web servers such as LightHTTPD or Microsoft IIS.
Requirements
• HTTP Server. For example: Apache. mod_rewrite is preferred, but by no means required.
• PHP 5.2.8 or greater.
Technically a database engine isn’t required, but we imagine that most applications will utilize one.
CakePHP supports a variety of database storage engines:
• MySQL (4 or greater)
• PostgreSQL
• Microsoft SQL Server
• SQLite
Note: The built-in drivers all require PDO. You should make sure you have the correct PDO extensions
installed.
License
CakePHP is licensed under the MIT license. This means that you are free to modify, distribute and republish
the source code on the condition that the copyright notices are left intact. You are also free to incorporate
CakePHP into any Commercial or closed source application.

Downloading CakePHP
There are two main ways to get a fresh copy of CakePHP. You can either download an archive copy
(zip/tar.gz/tar.bz2) from the main website, or check out the code from the git repository.
To download the latest major release of CakePHP. Visit the main website http://www.cakephp.org and follow
the “Download Now” link.
All current releases of CakePHP are hosted on Github (http://github.com/cakephp/cakephp). Github houses
both CakePHP itself as well as many other plugins for CakePHP. The CakePHP releases are available at
Github downloads (http://github.com/cakephp/cakephp/downloads).
Alternatively you can get fresh off the press code, with all the bug-fixes and up to the minute enhancements.
These can be accessed from github by cloning the Github (http://github.com/cakephp/cakephp) repository:
git clone git://github.com/cakephp/cakephp.git