# Managing your Applications

By default it is assumed that you only intend to use CodeIgniter to manage one application, which you will build in your application/ directory. It is possible, however, to have multiple sets of applications that share a single CodeIgniter installation, or even to rename or relocate your application directory.

## Renaming the Application Directory

If you would like to rename your application directory you may do so as long as you open your main index.php file and set its name using the `$application_folder` variable:

    $application_folder = 'application';

## Relocating your Application Directory

It is possible to move your application directory to a different location on your server than your web root. To do so open your main index.php and set a full server path in the `$application_folder` variable:

    $application_folder = '/path/to/your/application';

## Running Multiple Applications with one CodeIgniter Installation

If you would like to share a common CodeIgniter installation to manage several different applications simply put all of the directories located inside your application directory into their own sub-directory.

For example, let’s say you want to create two applications, named “foo” and “bar”. You could structure your application directories like this:

    applications/foo/
    applications/foo/config/
    applications/foo/controllers/
    applications/foo/libraries/
    applications/foo/models/
    applications/foo/views/
    applications/bar/
    applications/bar/config/
    applications/bar/controllers/
    applications/bar/libraries/
    applications/bar/models/
    applications/bar/views/

To select a particular application for use requires that you open your main index.php file and set the `$application_folder` variable. For example, to select the “foo” application for use you would do this:

    $application_folder = 'applications/foo';

Note

Each of your applications will need its own index.php file which calls the desired application. The index.php file can be named anything you want.