Integrating Twig Template Engine into CodeIgniter 2

CodeIgniter is a small and fast php framework, with a low threshold of entry. Although there are such strong men as Yii, Symfony and Kohana, for unknown reasons, I write all the projects on it. All is good, but CI has two rather tangible problems: the poorly developed ActiveRecord and the lack of a template engine. We will solve the second problem.

Why Twig, but not SMARTY?

As for me, SMARTY is something big, old and scary. On the other hand - powerful and time-tested. Twig is young, energetic and credible, as it is embedded in symfony, and this framework has a rather large and active community. Although yesterday we had a performance comparison in which SMARTY clearly won, I decided to try Twig.

We've finished with general information, let's get to the point - three simple steps for integrating Twig into CodeIgniter 2:
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1. Transfer Twig files to CI

Taking a stable version of Twig from gitHub
github.com/fabpot/twig
Extract the contents of the archive and rename the folder to Twig, transfer it to the application / libraries folder in your CI.

2. Link Twig to CI

We pick up a stable version of the same name Twig library for CI, which will give us the opportunity to call Twig from the controller.
github.com/jamiepittock/codeigniter-twig
From the archive, take the application folder and copy over the application folder in your CI.

3. Configure Twig Paths

Open the application / config / twig.php and change the path according to your settings. For example, I needed to change the cache path.

$config['cache_dir'] = BASEPATH.'cache/twig'; 

4 (optional). Enable caching and auto-update of Twig templates.

Open application / libraries / Twig.php from step two.
Replace

 $this->_twig = new Twig_Environment($loader 

on

 $twig_env_options = array( 'auto_reload' => true, 'cache' => $this->_cache_dir, ); $this->_twig = new Twig_Environment($loader, $twig_env_options 

Is done.

Connection (it is better to do this in the controller constructor, so as not to duplicate the code in each function)

 $this->load->library('twig'); 

Displaying a template is very similar to the built-in CI.
Built-in

 $this->load->view('forms/login_form', $data); 

Twig's

 echo $this->twig->render('forms/login_form.twig', $data); 

$data - associative array

Materials on the topic:
Twig Documentation
Twig Environment Options
Twig integration into symfony 1.4
Sample ready template