RealWorld
A fully-featured CakePHP example application implementing a real-world blogging platform API with CRUD, authentication, and advanced patterns.
What is RealWorld?
CakePHP RealWorld Example App is a fully-functional CakePHP backend implementation of a blogging platform API that follows the RealWorld specification. It demonstrates real-world development patterns including CRUD operations, JWT authentication, database relationships, and API structuring. The project solves the problem of finding a production-quality, educational example of how to build a complete application with CakePHP.
PHP developers learning CakePHP, backend engineers seeking reference implementations for API development, and teams needing a starting point for building similar blogging or content management platforms.
Developers choose this project because it provides a complete, well-structured example that adheres to a widely-recognized API specification, making it easy to understand and extend. It demonstrates best practices and integrates popular CakePHP plugins for common functionality.
Overview
This project is a production-ready CakePHP codebase that implements the RealWorld API specification, demonstrating how to build a complete blogging platform backend. It serves as an educational reference and a practical starting point for developers building similar applications with CakePHP.
Key Features
- Full CRUD Operations — Complete Create, Read, Update, and Delete functionality for users, articles, comments, and tags.
- JWT Authentication — Secure user authentication using JSON Web Tokens with middleware integration.
- Advanced Patterns — Implementation of services, actions, and renderers following CakePHP best practices.
- Database Relationships — Complex relationships between users, articles, comments, tags, favorites, and follows.
- API Specification Compliance — Adheres to the RealWorld spec, ensuring compatibility with any frontend that follows the same standard.
- Database Migrations & Seeding — Includes schema migrations and seed data for quick setup and testing.
Philosophy
The project emphasizes clean, maintainable code that follows CakePHP conventions while providing a real-world example of how to structure a modern API-driven application.
Related Projects
Found a gem we're missing?
Open-Awesome is built by the community, for the community. Submit a project, suggest an awesome list, or help improve the catalog on GitHub.
