Project Structure

A guided tour of every directory in a Nibiru project.

Stable Reading time ~ 1 min Edit on GitHub

my-app/
├── core/                   # Framework code (don't edit)
│   ├── a/                  # Abstract classes + adapters
│   ├── c/                  # Concrete classes (router, view, form types…)
│   ├── f/                  # Factories (db, form)
│   ├── i/                  # Interfaces
│   ├── l/                  # Composer vendor (yes, in core/)
│   ├── t/                  # Traits
│   └── framework.php       # Main bootstrap
├── application/            # Your app
│   ├── controller/         # *Controller.php files
│   ├── model/              # Auto-generated models (from DB schema)
│   ├── module/             # Modules (the second M in MMVC)
│   │   └── users/          #   each with its own MVC + plugins
│   ├── settings/
│   │   └── config/
│   │       ├── settings.<env>.ini
│   │       ├── database/   #   numbered SQL migration files
│   │       └── navigation/main.json
│   └── view/
│       ├── templates/      # Smarty .tpl files
│       ├── templates_c/    # Smarty compile cache (auto)
│       ├── cache/          # HTML cache (when caching=true)
│       └── mockup/         # Static design mockups
├── public/                 # CSS / JS / images / fonts (web-served)
├── nibiru                  # CLI binary
├── index.php               # Entry point
├── composer.json
└── vhost.conf              # Sample nginx vhost

Notable conventions

Controllers

File: application/controller/<name>Controller.php
Class: Nibiru\<name>Controller extends Nibiru\Adapter\Controller
Required methods: pageAction(), navigationAction(). Optional: any <verb>Action().

Views

File: application/view/templates/<name>.tpl for the matching controller.
Subviews go under application/view/templates/<name>/<action>.tpl.
Shared partials live in application/view/templates/shared/.

Models

Auto-generated under application/model/.
Filenames match table names. Each class extends a Db adapter (MySQL\Db or PostgreSQL\Db).

Modules

Folder: application/module/<name>/
Each module is its own MVC island plus traits, plugins, interfaces and settings.
The Registry auto-discovers *.ini settings inside each module’s settings/.

Migrations

application/settings/config/database/<NNN>-<slug>.sql
Numbered. Run via ./nibiru -mi <env>.
One file per logical change — don’t squash.

Composer vendor in `core/l/`

This is intentional. composer.json sets vendor-dir: core/l. The framework’s autoloader expects it there. Don’t move it.

`templates_c/` and `cache/`

Smarty must be able to write to templates_c/. Caching is opt-in via the INI key [ENGINE] caching = true. Both folders should be in your .gitignore.