New to CodeIgniter: Why isn't my basic routing working?

Hey everyone,

I'm a complete newbie to web development frameworks and I've decided to dive into CodeIgniter 4 for a small personal project. I'm literally just trying to get a basic "Hello World" page to load, but I'm completely stuck and could really use some help.

The problem is that even after setting up what I think are the right files, I keep getting a 404 "Page Not Found" error or sometimes just a blank page when I try to access my simple test URL. It's incredibly frustrating because I feel like I'm missing something super fundamental about how CodeIgniter works.

Here's what I've done so far:

• I created a controller file named app/Controllers/Home.php with a basic index() method.
• Inside that method, I'm trying to load a view file, app/Views/welcome_message.php (which I've renamed to hello_world.php for clarity and put a simple <h1>Hello World!</h1> inside).
• I've double-checked that my controller class name matches the file name (Home), and that the method exists.
• I've tried accessing it via URLs like http://localhost:8080/home and http://localhost:8080/home/index.
• I also tried to explicitly define a route in app/Config/Routes.php to map a simple URL to my controller and method, thinking that might fix it.

My expectation is to see "Hello World!" displayed in my browser. Instead, I'm consistently hitting a wall.

Here's a simplified version of my app/Controllers/Home.php:

<?php namespace App\Controllers;

class Home extends BaseController
{
    public function index()
    {
        return view('hello_world');
    }
}

And my app/Views/hello_world.php:

<h1>Hello World!</h1>

And this is what I added to app/Config/Routes.php (commenting out the default route for testing):

$routes->get('/', 'Home::index');
$routes->get('/hello', 'Home::index'); // My custom route attempt

When I visit http://localhost:8080/hello, I get this error in my browser:

404 - File Not Found
Controller or its method is not found: App\Controllers\Home::index.

It's baffling because I can clearly see the files there and the method exists. I'm definitely missing something fundamental about CodeIgniter's routing mechanism, especially for a beginner like me. Could someone please walk me through the correct way to set up basic routing and what common mistakes or pitfalls I might be falling into? Any help would be immensely appreciated