Kohana surprises once again with its simplicity in working with the code. Let’s say you have a framework or class and you want to make it load on every page within your Kohana application. Regularly, you’d include the files on each page with a line like this:

require_once('../tcpdf.php');

Here, we’re dealing with a .pdf creator class called tcpdf which enables the creation of .pdf files. To turn it into a Kohana module means that we won’t have to include the tcpdf.php file on every page and remember the directory it’s in and provide a relative link to that directory.

To start, you’ll need to create an init.php file and place it in the root folder of your class. My init.php file looks like this:

<?php
require_once('../config/lang/eng.php');
require_once('../tcpdf.php');
?>

Then place your entire class folder in the /modules directory of your Kohana project. There is only one more step to creating your first simple Kohana Module.

Enter your bootstrap.php (/application/boostrap.php) and add a line under your modules array:

'tcpdf'     => MODPATH.'tcpdf', // Creates pdfs

It’s done. Now you can call any method of the class without needing to require the class on every page.