Hi, there are many tutorials about this, but i would like to type the steps i followed in order to get cakephp working on my user public_html folder.
as many of you probably know, if you have apache's userdir module loaded, you can put your web pages on /home/user/public_html , and access them with the url: http://localhost/~user/ . I really prefer this, so all my web pages are on my personal home, but how to configure cakephp to work with these paths, i got a hard time with this, but finally got it!. here's how:

in case you don't have apache2's userdir module:


you need the rewrite module also... (this could be done with the same method used for userdir)


Now lets edit some apache files...

inside the first two <directory></directory> tags, change the AllowOverride lines:

do the same on /etc/apache2/mods-enabled/userdir.conf


Now you need to restart you apache2 server...


i'll assume you've already downloaded cakephp latest release or that you know where you can find it

unpack the downloaded file in /home/user/public_html/
rename the extracted folder (thats the name of your application)

edit the .htaccess file so it look like these:


now point your browser to http://localhost/~user/application_name and you show see cakephp's default page
good luck!