Practical Guide to Using Phalcon: Project Architecture, Entry File, Nginx Configuration, Controller Routing, and CRUD Operations

The article introduces a Phalcon tutorial series, starting with an overview of the project’s directory layout, which resembles typical MVC frameworks and includes a migrations folder similar to Laravel.

It then explains the essential index.php entry file, noting that Phalcon loads configuration files such as /config/services.php for database connections and /config/router.php for routing.

Next, a simple Nginx configuration is provided for a Windows environment using PhpStudy; the full server block is shown below:

server {
    listen        80;
    server_name   www.kakaweb.com;
    root          "D:/phpstudy_pro/WWW/phalcon/public";
    index         index.php index.html error/index.html;
    location / {
        try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php?_url=$uri&$args;
    }
    location ~ \.php(.*)$ {
        fastcgi_pass   127.0.0.1:9002;
        fastcgi_index  index.php;
        fastcgi_split_path_info ^((?U).+\.php)(/?.+)$;
        fastcgi_param  SCRIPT_FILENAME  $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
        fastcgi_param  PATH_INFO  $fastcgi_path_info;
        fastcgi_param  PATH_TRANSLATED  $document_root$fastcgi_path_info;
        include        fastcgi_params;
    }
    location ~ /\.ht {
        deny all;
    }
}

The guide then demonstrates controller routing by creating an additional method kaka in the IndexController , accessible via http://www.kakaweb.com/index/kaka , and shows the resulting HTML link output.

CRUD operations are illustrated using Phalcon’s model manager with raw PHQL statements. Insertion example:

public function holdAction() {
    $user = new User();
    $phql = "INSERT INTO User (name, age, sex) VALUES (:name:, :age:, :sex:)";
    $status = $user->modelsManager->executeQuery($phql, array(
        'name' => "咔咔1",
        'age'  => 24,
        'sex'  => 1
    ));
}

Update example:

public function modifyAction() {
    $user = new User();
    $phql = "UPDATE User SET name = :name:, age = :age:, sex = :sex: WHERE id = :id:";
    $status = $user->modelsManager->executeQuery($phql, array(
        'id'   => 20,
        'name' => "咔咔2",
        'age'  => 25,
        'sex'  => 2
    ));
}

Delete example:

public function deleteAction() {
    $user = new User();
    $phql = "DELETE FROM User WHERE id = :id:";
    $status = $user->modelsManager->executeQuery($phql, array(
        'id' => 20
    ));
}

The article notes that find() retrieves all records, findFirst() returns the first record, and that PHQL can be used for conditional queries such as find("type = 'mechanical'") .

In the code optimization section, the author points out the repeated instantiation of the User model across methods and suggests a centralized model management approach to simplify future refactoring.

Finally, the summary emphasizes that while the tutorial uses raw SQL‑like PHQL for CRUD, the underlying SQL statements remain consistent across frameworks, and developers should not dismiss these fundamental operations.