Yii2: Bring the assets from your module to your view

If you want to ship assets (JavaScript, CSS files) from your Yii2 module to your view, you can do that elegant with a couple of simple steps.

1., Folder structure

We assume that your Yii2 module is located at

/yii-base-folder/modules/YOUR-YII-MODULE-FOLDER

The assets are at

/yii-base-folder/modules/YOUR-YII-MODULE-FOLDER/assets

So the JavaScript files are at

/yii-base-folder/modules/YOUR-YII-MODULE-FOLDER/assets/js

2., Set an alias to your assets in your Module.php in your module (/yii-base-folder/modules/YOUR-YII-MODULE-FOLDER/Module.php)

3., Put your asset class into your assets folder to setup your "assets bundle"

We name a bunch of assets "assets bundle". Here you declare your files and make it accessible to your view.

4., Now you can access your assets from your view

We assume that your view's index.php file is located at /yii-base-folder/modules/YOUR-MODULE/views/ANY-VIEWS-SUBFOLDER/index.php

5., Conclusion

Now Yii2 puts your CSS and JavaScript files nicely into your HTML. By default the JavaScript files will be put nicely into the footer of your HTML. Also the CSS and JavaScript files will be copied into your web-accessible assets folder. The users from your webpage will not be allowed to get info about your Yii project folder structure. So the path to your JavaScript file will look like that: 

The path in your project's directory will be:
/YOUR-Yii2-PROJECT/web/assets/3598bbc6/js/YOUR-JavaScript-File.js

Also the PHP asset class will be copied from your module's folder:
/YOUR-Yii2-PROJECT/web/assets/3598bbc6/YourAssetsPhpClass.php

Don't forget to not modify the files at /YOUR-Yii2-PROJECT/web/assets/3598bbc6/ manually, because they're created automatically by the Yii2 framework.

6., Learn more

The "The Definitive Guide to Yii 2.0" is mostly the best first place to learn about Yii2. So you find more detailed information about the assets functionality at the assets chapter. I recommend also to read the excellent PHP class comments in the Yii2 core. Like f.e. /YOUR-Yii2-PROJECT/vendor/yiisoft/yii2/web/AssetBundle.php. Yii2 is one of the few OpenSource projects where the PHP code itself can often lead you to your goals.

MySQL: Dump database and compress it from command line via mysqldump

The following command does the job:

mysqldump -uUSERNAME -pPASSWORD --databases DATABASE --lock-all-tables | gzip -9 -c > DATABASE.sql.gz

If the database is very big and you want to check the created SQL, use the following command after unpacking the Gzip archive:

head -n 10 DATABASE.sql

Yii2: Access your services within your module

There're some ways to declare the service in your config file for global use, but I wanted a way to setup my service in my module. Well, it took me a while so I write the way down here to look back in future to not search around the web.

Firstly you need to declare the service in your module:
Afterwards you can access your module wherever you want to (note the cast for handier usage in your IDE):