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Getting started

Requirements

Smarty can be run with PHP 7.2 to PHP 8.3.

Installation

Smarty can be installed with Composer.

To get the latest stable version of Smarty use:

composer require smarty/smarty

To get the latest, unreleased version, use:

composer require smarty/smarty:dev-master

To get the previous stable version of Smarty, Smarty 4, use:

composer require smarty/smarty:^4

Here's how you create an instance of Smarty in your PHP scripts:

<?php

// Instantiated via composer
require 'vendor/autoload.php';
use Smarty\Smarty;
$smarty = new Smarty();

// or ...

// Instantiated directly
require("/path/to/smarty/libs/Smarty.class.php");
use Smarty\Smarty;
$smarty = new Smarty();

Now that the library files are in place, it's time to set up the Smarty directories for your application.

Smarty requires four directories which are by default named templates, configs, templates_c and cache relative to the current working directory.

The defaults can be changed as follows:

<?php
use Smarty\Smarty;
$smarty = new Smarty();
$smarty->setTemplateDir('/some/template/dir');
$smarty->setConfigDir('/some/config/dir');
$smarty->setCompileDir('/some/compile/dir');
$smarty->setCacheDir('/some/cache/dir');

The compile dir and cache dir need to be writable for the user running the PHP script.

Note

This is usually user "nobody" and group "nobody". For OS X users, the default is user "www" and group "www". If you are using Apache, you can look in your httpd.conf file to see what user and group are being used.

chown nobody:nobody /web/www.example.com/guestbook/templates_c/
chmod 770 /web/www.example.com/guestbook/templates_c/

chown nobody:nobody /web/www.example.com/guestbook/cache/
chmod 770 /web/www.example.com/guestbook/cache/

You can verify if your system has the correct access rights for these directories with testInstall():

<?php
use Smarty\Smarty;
$smarty = new Smarty();
$smarty->setTemplateDir('/some/template/dir');
$smarty->setConfigDir('/some/config/dir');
$smarty->setCompileDir('/some/compile/dir');
$smarty->setCacheDir('/some/cache/dir');
$smarty->testInstall();

Basic usage

Now, let's create the index.tpl file that Smarty will display. This needs to be located in the $template_dir.

{* Smarty *}
<h1>Hello {$name|escape}, welcome to Smarty!</h1>

Note

{* Smarty *} is a template comment. It is not required, but it is good practice to start all your template files with this comment. It makes the file easy to recognize regardless of the file extension. For example, text editors could recognize the file and turn on special syntax highlighting.

Now lets edit our php file. We'll create an instance of Smarty, assign() a template variable and display() the index.tpl file.

<?php

require 'vendor/autoload.php';

use Smarty\Smarty;
$smarty = new Smarty();

$smarty->setTemplateDir('/web/www.example.com/guestbook/templates/');
$smarty->setCompileDir('/web/www.example.com/guestbook/templates_c/');
$smarty->setConfigDir('/web/www.example.com/guestbook/configs/');
$smarty->setCacheDir('/web/www.example.com/guestbook/cache/');

$smarty->assign('name', 'Ned');
$smarty->display('index.tpl');

Note

In our example, we are setting absolute paths to all the Smarty directories. If /web/www.example.com/guestbook/ is within your PHP include_path, then these settings are not necessary. However, it is more efficient and (from experience) less error-prone to set them to absolute paths. This ensures that Smarty is getting files from the directories you intended.

Now, run your PHP file. You should see "Hello Ned, welcome to Smarty!"

You have completed the basic setup for Smarty!

Escaping

You may have noticed that the example template above renders the $name variable using the escape modifier. This modifier makes string 'safe' to use in the context of an HTML page.

If you are primarily using Smarty for HTML-pages, it is recommended to enable automatic escaping. This way, you don't have to add |escape to every variable you use on a web page. Smarty will handle it automatically for you!

Enable auto-escaping for HTML as follows:

$smarty->setEscapeHtml(true);

Extended Setup

This is a continuation of the basic installation, please read that first!

A slightly more flexible way to set up Smarty is to extend the Smarty class and initialize your Smarty environment. So instead of repeatedly setting directory paths, assigning the same vars, etc., we can do that in one place.

<?php

use Smarty\Smarty;

class My_GuestBook extends Smarty {

   public function __construct()
   {
        parent::__construct();

        $this->setTemplateDir('/web/www.example.com/guestbook/templates/');
        $this->setCompileDir('/web/www.example.com/guestbook/templates_c/');
        $this->setConfigDir('/web/www.example.com/guestbook/configs/');
        $this->setCacheDir('/web/www.example.com/guestbook/cache/');
        
        $this->setEscapeHtml(true);

        $this->caching = Smarty::CACHING_LIFETIME_CURRENT;
        $this->assign('app_name', 'Guest Book');
   }

}

Now, we can use My_GuestBook instead of Smarty in our scripts:

<?php
$smarty = new My_GuestBook();
$smarty->assign('name', 'Ned');
$smarty->display('index.tpl');

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