Building a site on TinyTank

A new site starts from the skeleton and installs the framework as a Composer package. The site adds its own routes, controllers, templates, content and commands, and never edits the framework.

The rule: never edit vendor/

Everything site-specific lives in your own files:

What	Where
Routes	config/routes.php
Settings	config/app.php, .env
Services, Twig extensions, deploy steps	config/bootstrap.php
Controllers, commands, other classes	src/ (namespace App\)
Templates	templates/
Posts	content/
UI texts	translations/
CSS, JS, Vite entry points	resources/, vite.config.js
Tests	tests/

Framework improvements then arrive with a single command, without touching your files:

composer update tinytank/framework

If you find yourself needing to change the framework, that's a missing extension point: open an issue or contribute it to TinyTank instead (see Contributing). See Updating TinyTank for versions and what to check after an update.

The extension points

Extension point	Use it for	Guide
config/bootstrap.php	services, Twig extensions and globals, deploy steps	Services & bootstrap
$app->container	shared objects (a mailer, an API client)	Services & bootstrap
src/Command/	console commands, registered automatically	Console commands
$app->addDeployStep()	build steps in bin/console deploy	Deploy steps
TinyTank\Controller	controllers with helpers	Controllers
vite.config.js	entry points, extra Vite plugins	Frontend & Vite

A typical small app

TinyTank is not opinionated about your application code. A small app usually is:

• the blog, for articles around the app's subject
• one or more custom routes and controllers: the app itself, for instance an interactive home page driven by Datastar, plus JSON endpoints its JavaScript loads ($this->json(…))
• services for anything shared (config/bootstrap.php)
• commands for build or maintenance tasks, hooked into deploy when they produce files the site serves

Housekeeping when you start a site

• Commit your composer.lock (remove it from .gitignore first)
• Replace the Datastar demo page and the sample blog posts
• Set the real site name, description, default share image and author in config/app.php
• Choose the languages (language, languages) and fill translations/*.php
• Prepare each server's .env (APP_URL, APP_SECRET, APP_OPCACHE…), see Servers & Opcache