🔥 Forge Starter: Your Barebones Forge Playground!

Hey there! 👋 Welcome to Forge Starter – think of this as your super lightweight starting kit for building web apps with the Forge PHP framework. It's got just the essentials to get you going quickly, so your project stays nice and lean.

What's Inside This Kit?

Forge Starter comes with a couple of cool things pre-installed:

• ForgePackageManager: This is the Forge package manager itself! You'll use this to easily add and manage any extra modules you want in your project.
• ForgeErrorHandler: This helps you handle errors and exceptions like a pro. During development, it'll show you helpful error pages, and in production, it'll make sure things fail gracefully.
• ForgeWelcome: This is the welcome page that you see when you run this project.
• ForgeUi: This is the forge component ui that the ForgeWelcome use.

This minimal setup means your project starts super small (under 400KB!). It's perfect if you're all about speed, simplicity, and knowing exactly what's going on in your code, after you are done checking how the modules works, you can remove the module that you dont need, for example the ForgeWelcome, ForgeUi, etc, if you dont need to have a more human friendly error handler, just remove it, if you dont want a package manager cli remove it.

Let's Get This Show on the Road! (Installation)

Getting started with Forge Starter is a piece of cake:

1. Grab a copy of this project:

   git clone [repository-url] your-project-name
   cd your-project-name

   (Just replace [repository-url] with the actual link to this Forge Starter repository, and your-project-name with whatever you want to name your project folder.)

2. Install the basics using ForgePackageManager:

   php install.php
   php forge.php package:install-project

   This command will look at the forge.lock.json file (or forge.json if it's a brand new project) and install the main Forge framework bits and any modules listed in your forge.json file. This gets your project set up with the core of Forge and the stuff that comes with the starter.

3. Tweak your settings:

   • Environment stuff: Copy the .env.example file to .env and open up .env to set things like your database info and your website's URL.
   • Make it secure (optional, but a good idea!):

     php forge.php key:generate

     (This command creates a unique key for your app and puts it in your .env file. It's especially important for security when your site goes live.)

4. See your app in action (for testing): You can use Forge's built-in mini-server:

   php forge.php serve

   This will start a little server for you, usually at http://localhost:8080. You can even change the address and port if you want:

   php forge.php serve 127.0.0.1 9090

   That'll make it run at http://127.0.0.1:9090.

   Or, if you prefer, you can use PHP's own built-in server directly:

   php -S localhost:8000 -t public

   Then just open your browser and go to http://localhost:8000.

💡 Want More Features? Add Modules!

One of the cool things about Forge is that it's super modular. You can easily add more features to your Forge Starter project by installing extra modules using the ForgePackageManager.

To add a new module, just run this command:

php forge.php package:install-module module-name@[module-version]

(Replace [module-name] with the name of the Forge module you want to install, e.g., forge package:require ForgeDatabaseModule. You can find a list of available modules at the Forge Modules Repository.)

Other Useful Forge Commands:

The Forge command-line tool has a bunch of useful commands to help you manage your project:

Command	Description
php forge.php package-install:module <name>	Install a module
php forge.php package:remove-module <name>	Remove a module
php forge.php package:list-modules	Show installed modules
php forge.php clear:cache	Clears the cache views, classes
php forge.php clear:log	Clears the logs
php forge.php make:module	Creates a new Forge module with a basic directory structure

• You can always see the full list of available commands and their descriptions by running:

php forge.php help

License

Forge Engine, Modules, Starter are open-source software licensed under the MIT license.

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📚 Documentation