Forum Project Structure

Start from an installed CorianderPHP 0.4.1 app; see Installation. This chapter establishes app-owned folders before adding SQLite, permissions, and forms.

Create The First Route

You can run:

php coriander make:route forum-demo

This creates src/Views/forum-demo.get.php. Replace its contents with a temporary response:

<?php
use CorianderCore\Core\Http\Responses;
use Psr\Http\Message\ServerRequestInterface;

return static fn (ServerRequestInterface $request) =>
    Responses::html('<h1>Forum setup works</h1>');

Visit /forum-demo and check php coriander routes:list. Discovery is automatic: do not add an include to public/routes.php.

For the finished feature we will move this root handler to forum-demo/index.get.php. Remove the temporary forum-demo.get.php when doing that: both represent the same GET URL and would conflict.

Prepare The App Structure

src/
  Actions/
    ForumActions.php
    ForumApiActions.php
  Middleware/
    ForumDemoAdminMiddleware.php
  Modules/ForumDemo/
    Auth/
    Data/
    Permissions/
    Writes/
  Views/
    _header.php
    _footer.php
    forum-demo/_index.php
    api/forum-demo/
    forum-demo/
database/migrations/
src/Views/forum-demo/_script.ts

Create action and module classes as normal PHP files. There is no action/controller generator; create these ordinary app classes by hand. With the starter's "App\\": "src/" Composer mapping, src/Actions/ForumActions.php uses namespace App\Actions.

• Views: method files define URLs, _middleware.php declares inherited gates, and unsuffixed templates render prepared data.
• Actions: request coordination, response selection, and redirects.
• Auth: current user from the session.
• Data: SQLite reads.
• Permissions: the shared ability matrix.
• Writes: real local writes and the optional public-demo guard.
• Unsuffixed templates do not expose endpoints; method files in the same tree do.

Run composer dump-autoload if you changed Composer mappings.

Configure SQLite

DB_TYPE=sqlite
DB_NAME=database/forum.sqlite

Ensure the database directory exists and is writable locally. The next chapter creates and seeds tables through a migration.

Keep root security middleware from the starter. We will add an admin gate under the forum routes; do not disable CSRF to make future forms work.

Checkpoint

Your temporary GET /forum-demo responds and all new files are outside CorianderCore. Next, create the SQLite Data Model. No login or persistence is expected yet.