Overview
The Setup plugin provides a collection of useful development and maintenance tools for managing a CakePHP application. It bundles maintenance-mode handling, a pluggable healthcheck stack, debugging helpers, console utilities, a small admin web backend, and enhanced bake templates.
CakePHP version
This documentation is for the branch that supports CakePHP 5.1+. See the version map for older releases.
What is this plugin for?
This plugin aims to make developing and operating CakePHP applications easier. It extends and leverages the Tools plugin and brings together the pieces that are useful day to day:
- Maintenance Mode — dynamic activation and deactivation, including dynamic IP whitelisting and a middleware that short-circuits the request early.
- Healthcheck — a pluggable set of environment, application, and database checks, runnable from the web or the CLI.
- Console utilities — config inspection, database management, data-integrity checks, backups, user management, and more.
- Web backend — a small admin area with a configuration dashboard plus cache, session, cookie, database, and foreign-key tooling.
- DebugKit panel — a localization (L10n) panel for quick format inspection.
- Bake templates — refined scaffolding output for models, controllers, and views.
The pieces
| Area | What it gives you |
|---|---|
| Maintenance Mode | Turn the app on and off for soft maintenance work, with whitelisting and middleware. |
| Healthcheck | A status overview of your environment, application, and database, web and CLI. |
| Console Commands | Day-to-day operations from bin/cake — config, DB, backups, users. |
| Bake Templates | Enhanced scaffolding via the Setup bake theme. |
| Setup Component | Quick-switch debugging helpers attached to your controller. |
| Web Backend | An admin backend behind your own ACL. |
| L10n Panel | A DebugKit panel showing localization status. |
Debugging helpers
The plugin ships a few convenience wrappers that make debugging safer. They only produce output when debug is enabled:
| Helper | Equivalent |
|---|---|
dd($data) | debug() + die() |
prd($data) | pr() + die() |
vd($data) | var_dump() |
vdd($data) | var_dump() + die() |
These become available once the plugin's bootstrap is included — for example via bin/cake plugin load Setup.
Next steps
- Installation — install the plugin and load it.
- Maintenance Mode — enable and disable maintenance safely.
- Healthcheck — monitor your application's health.
- Console Commands — the operational toolbox.