Project structure

Before writing code it helps to know where things live. In a Laminas project every folder has one job, and new files almost always go into the module folder.

Folders in the project root

Folder or file	What it holds
`config`	Application configuration and the module list
`config/autoload`	Shared configuration: `global.php` and `local.php`
`module`	Your code, organised into modules
`public`	The site root: `index.php`, styles, scripts, images
`data`	Cache and other files the application creates
`vendor`	Packages downloaded by Composer; never edited by hand
`composer.json`	The package list and class loading rules

The entry point

Every request to the site goes to public/index.php. It includes Composer's class loader, reads the configuration and runs the application:

// public/index.php (the main lines)
use Laminas\Mvc\Application;
 
chdir(dirname(__DIR__));
 
include __DIR__ . '/../vendor/autoload.php';
 
$appConfig = require __DIR__ . '/../config/application.config.php';
 
Application::init($appConfig)->run();

The chdir() line makes the project root the current folder, so paths in the configuration are written from the root: data/cache, config/autoload. You normally never change this file.

The config folder

File	Purpose
`application.config.php`	Startup settings: where modules and configuration come from, whether caching is on
`modules.config.php`	The list of enabled modules
`autoload/global.php`	Settings shared by all machines
`autoload/local.php`	Passwords and keys of one particular machine

The Application module

A module is a folder with the code of one part of the site. The skeleton ships with one module:

module/Application/
├── config/
│   └── module.config.php
├── src/
│   ├── Controller/
│   │   └── IndexController.php
│   └── Module.php
└── view/
    ├── application/index/index.phtml
    ├── error/404.phtml
    ├── error/index.phtml
    └── layout/layout.phtml

config holds the module's configuration, src holds PHP classes and view holds page templates, called view scripts (files with the .phtml extension). layout/layout.phtml is the common frame of all pages, and error/404.phtml is the "not found" page.

The public folder

Only this folder is visible from the browser. The file public/css/style.css opens at /css/style.css. Everything else — code, configuration, passwords — sits one level above and cannot be reached by a link.

Common mistake

Do not put your own classes and view scripts into vendor and do not edit files inside it: the next composer install or composer update wipes the changes. Your code lives in module, settings live in config, and vendor belongs entirely to Composer.

Thanks for reading!