Installation & Setup

Prerequisites & Dependencies

Frigate requires PHP 8.1 or higher. It is recommended to use the latest stable version of PHP to ensure you have all the latest security patches and performance improvements. Frigate depends on the following PHP extensions:

mbstring - Multibyte string functions (should be available everywhere)
json - JavaScript Object Notation (should be available everywhere)

Beside core PHP extensions, Frigate also depends on the following PHP libraries, which are dependencies managed by Composer automatically:

guzzlehttp/guzzle Used for making HTTP requests.
sabre/uri Functions for making sense out of URIs.
vlucas/phpdotenv PHP dotenv loads environment variables from .env to getenv(), $_ENV and $_SERVER automagically.
twig/twig Twig, the flexible, fast, and secure template language for PHP.
firebase/php-jwt A simple library to encode and decode JSON Web Tokens (JWT) in PHP.

Note

Frigate aims to be lightweight and minimalistic. That's why we are doing our best to keep the number of dependencies as low as possible and only use the most essential and stable libraries.

Installation

Install Frigate with composer:

composer require siktec/frigate

Create a project

You may want to start with a bootstrap project to get started:

composer create-project siktec/frigate-bootstrap

Project Structure

Frigate is designed to be simple and flexible. It does not enforce any specific project structure. You are free to organize your project however you want. However, we recommend the following project structure (which is also used in the Frigate Bootstrap project):

├── root
│   │
│   ├── api # API endpoints goes here (PSR-4)
│   ├── routes # Routes goes here (PSR-4)
│   ├── models # Models goes here (PSR-4)
│   ├── static # Static files goes here
│   ├── pages # Front-end stuff goes here (PSR-4)
│   ├── cli # CLI files goes here (PSR-4)
│   │
│   ├── index.php # Entry point
│   ├── .env # Environment variables goes here
│   ├── .htaccess # Apache configuration file (optional)
│   ├── composer.json # Composer configuration file

Setting up the server

Frigate is designed to run on Apache and Nginx web servers. It is recommended to use the latest stable version of Apache or Nginx to ensure you have all the latest security patches and performance improvements.

No matter which web server you are using you will need to make sure that any requests to your Frigate application are sent to the index.php file. This is called "routing" and is configured differently depending on which web server you are using. For more information on configuring your web server, see the official Apache or Nginx documentation.

Apache

When using Apache, you need to make sure that the mod_rewrite module is enabled. This can be done by running the following command:

# Enable mod_rewrite
sudo a2enmod rewrite

# Restart Apache to apply changes
sudo service apache2 restart

If you are using Apache, you can use the following .htaccess file in the root of your project to route all requests to the index.php file. Besides routing, this .htaccess file also disables directory browsing and hides all environment files.

# Disable directory browsing
Options -Indexes

# Hide all environment files
<Files .env>
    Order allow,deny
    Deny from all
</Files>

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>

    RewriteEngine On 

    # allow HTTP basic authentication (1)
    RewriteCond %{HTTP:Authorization} ^(.+)$
    RewriteRule .* - [E=HTTP_AUTHORIZATION:%{HTTP:Authorization}]

    # Optional: Set the base path to the public folder
    # RewriteBase / 
    RewriteRule . index.php [QSA,L]

</IfModule>

This is required if you are using HTTP Basic Authentication. Without this, the Authorization header will not be available to Frigate. Its mainly for Development and Testing purposes; so unless you are using HTTP Basic Authentication for production, comment out these lines.

Info

If you created your project using the Frigate Bootstrap project, this .htaccess file is already included in your project.

Once you have created your .htaccess file, you need to make sure that your Apache virtual host is configured with the AllowOverride option. This will allow your .htaccess file to override the default settings of your Apache virtual host. You can do this by editing your virtual host configuration file and changing the AllowOverride option from None to All:

sudo nano /etc/apache2/sites-available/000-default.conf

Inside the <VirtualHost *:80> block, change the AllowOverride option to All:

<VirtualHost *:80>
    <Directory /var/www/html>
        Options Indexes FollowSymLinks
        AllowOverride All
        Require all granted
    </Directory>

    . . .
</VirtualHost>

Then restart Apache to apply changes:

sudo service apache2 restart

If everything is configured correctly, any requests to your Frigate application should now be routed to the index.php file.

Performance Considerations

.htaccess files and mod_rewrite are sometimes considered as a performance issue. When using .htaccess files every request to your application will be checked for the existence of a .htaccess file in every part of the directory tree. This means that several "additional" filesystem accesses are required for every request.

In our case, we are using a single .htaccess file in the root of our project. The rule will terminate immediately for any request [QSA,L]. This should minimize the performance impact of using .htaccess files. However, if you are concerned about performance, you can disable .htaccess files and move the rules to your virtual host configuration file. This will reduce the number of filesystem accesses required for every request. see the mod_rewrite documentation for more information.

The reason we are using .htaccess is that most shared hosting providers do not allow you to edit the virtual host configuration file. .htaccess files are the only way to configure your application in this case. It is also the easiest way to configure your application and add additional rules that may be required for your application to work correctly.

Nginx

When using Nginx, you need to make sure that the try_files directive is configured correctly. This can be done by editing your Nginx configuration file, the goal is to make sure that any requests to your Frigate application are routed to the index.php file.

Nginx does not support .htaccess files, so you need to make sure that your Nginx configuration file is configured correctly. If you are using Nginx, you need to adjust the configuration file to include the following location block, This will route all requests to the index.php:

server {
    listen 80 default_server;
    listen [::]:80 default_server;

    root /var/www/html;

    index index.php index.html index.htm index.nginx-debian.html;

    server_name example.com www.example.com;

    # Block access to environment files (just in case)
    location ~ /\.env { 
        deny all;
    }

    # Route all requests to index.php 
    location / {
        try_files /index.php?$query_string;
    }

    location ~ \.php$ {
        include snippets/fastcgi-php.conf;
        fastcgi_pass unix:/var/run/php/php8.2-fpm.sock;
    }

    # deny access to .htaccess, .htpasswd.
    location ~ /\.ht {
        deny all;
    }
}

Nginx configuration file location

The configuration file by default is located at /etc/nginx/sites-available/default or /etc/nginx/nginx.conf depending on your setup.