Write modern PHP without a framework
Since the introduction of Composer package manager and the PHP standards, writing PHP became easier and more manageable, whereas in the past you were almost forced to use a framework to maintain your project in a professional matter, nowadays this is not necessary, and today I will show you how to glue together a small API project with basic routing, third party packages, and testing without a framework.
There are few reasons why you don’t want to use a framework, you are creating a library, a small app/API, have more control, and so forth, depending on your cases you might want to use a framework don’t get me wrong.
Our goal is to create a simple Blog Api, each post will have an id, title, and body, you will able to list, create and view a post, we won’t use any database, a simple JSON file that will act as DB should be enough, all request/responses will be in JSON format
As you see, there are some fields and features missing, like a slug, summary, published date, author, tags, categories, and so forth, or the ability to delete/update, I decided to not implement those, and I’ll briefly explain some classes and code without getting into too much detail to make this article shorter if you need an extra explanation of any step please leave it in the comments and I will do my best to help you there.
All code is available in https://gitlab.com/dhgouveia/medium-blog-api
Prerequisites
- PHP 7.0 or greater
- Composer
- Basic knowledge of PHP, classes, composer, MVC pattern
Ok, let’s start!
Setting up Composer
The first thing we need to do is create our composer.json
needed to add 3rd party packages and manage our project with the autoloading feature, this will make importing classes easier.
Create a folder and type composer init
in your terminal and fill the information, it will create the composer.json
file for us, then create our basic folder structure with some empty files called index.php
,config.php
and an empty folder called App
Let’s add the first package by using the command line composer require monolog/monolog:1.25.1
, it creates a vendor
folder with the package we just added and a file called autoload.php
, this file will contain all the path to the classes we add from 3rd parties and ours, monolog
is a package to create logs files that will be used later on
Open index.php
and fill it with:
<?php
require __DIR__ . '/vendor/autoload.php';
modify the composer.json
by adding the autoload
entry after the type
entry
"type": "project",
"autoload": {
"psr-4": {
"App\\": "App/"
}
},
then type composer dump-autoload
to update the autoload entries, the autoload
entry will register all our classes to be used anywhere in our app, psr-4
is a more flexible autoloading standard specification thanpsr-0
, you don’t need to regenerate the autoloader when you add classes for example.
By now, the app is already setup to work with composer, you can run php index.php
in the terminal, if no error is shown it means is working, this shouldn't output anything
Adding our first class
Let’s make a Config helper to use across the project, we are going to have 2 files, config.php
at the root of the project, with some settings for the app, here is where you put your API Key, Cache setting, etc, and you should have a different one base on your environment (test, stage, prod), and the other file will be App/Lib/Config.php
to read those variables
Open config.php
and fill it with:
<?php
return [
'LOG_PATH' => __DIR__ . './logs',
];
create a new file inside App/Lib/
called it Config.php
and paste this code
This code reads the Array from config.php
and check if the key exists in the array if so return the value otherwise return the default value given
Let’s check if working by editing the index.php
adding these lines
<?php require __DIR__ . '/vendor/autoload.php';// New lines
use App\Lib\Config;
$LOG_PATH = Config::get('LOG_PATH', '');
echo "[LOG_PATH]: $LOG_PATH";
now run php index.php
and should output the path of the logs specified on config.php
It seems not much but at this point, you should be getting an idea how the rest of the code will work, we’ll add some classes into App
folder and thanks to the autoloading will be accessible anywhere in the app.
So if you manage to follow along until here, congrats! grab some coffee and let’s continue.
Adding Logging
Earlier we added the monolog
package to our dependencies, this package contains a series of classes and helpers to manage logs. Logging is an essential part of any app since it will be the first thing you check when anything goes wrong and packages like monolog make this job easier and even the possibility to send those via email, slack, telegram, you name it!, for this app, I want to create three simple log files errors.log
, requests.log
and app.log
errors and requests logs will be active all the time and app logs will be used on demand for us to display desire information, errors.log
will contain any error that happens in the app, requests.log
will log any HTTP request made to the app
create App/Lib/Logger.php
and paste the code below, this will be a wrapper that will manage our different logs
now we have two main functions Logger::enableSystemLogs()
this will enable our error/request logs, and then we have Logger::getInstance()
that by default will be our App
log, let’s try it, modify our index.php
once again with these new lines
<?php require __DIR__ . '/vendor/autoload.php';use App\Lib\Config;
$LOG_PATH = Config::get('LOG_PATH', '');
echo "[LOG_PATH]: $LOG_PATH";//New Lines
use App\Lib\Logger;Logger::enableSystemLogs();
$logger = Logger::getInstance();
$logger->info('Hello World');
type php -S localhost:8000
it’ll run a built-in web server that is present in PHP since 5.4, navigate to http://localhost:8000, you should see the “LOG_PATH”, but if you check your logs
folder you will see two files, showing the requested content and another one with “Hello World” text, take a time to tweak the request
if you need to show specific info or remove it, this was meant to show different types of logging
finally lets clean a little bit our index.php
and create a new file called App/Lib/App.php
, let’s use this as a bootstrap to our app
and update the index.php
<?php require __DIR__ . '/vendor/autoload.php';
use App\Lib\App;App::run();
looks much nicer right?
Adding Routing
In any modern app, routing takes a huge part of it, this will call a specific code based on the path in the URL we choose, for example /
could show the homepage, /post/1
could show the post information with id 1, for this we will implement three classes Router.php
, Request.php
and Response.php
Our Router.php
will be very basic, it will verify the request method and match the path we are giving using regex, if match, it will execute a callback function given by us with two parameters Request
and Response
, Request.php
will have some functions to get the data that was sent in the request, for example, the Post data such as title, body to create it, and Response.php
will have some functions to output as JSON with specific HTTP status
create App/Lib/Router.php
, App/Lib/Request.php
, App/Lib/Response.php
update your index.php
with the code below,
type php -S localhost:8000
to test it and navigate to http://localhost:8000/ and you should see ‘Hello World’ and http://localhost:8000/post/1, you should see a JSON response with status ‘ok’ and the id you gave inside ‘Post’
{"status": "ok", "post": { "id" : 1} }
if you are using Apache you might need to add this .htaccess
file to the root of your project
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteRule ^(.+)$ index.php [QSA,L]
in the case of Nginx
location / {
try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php$is_args$args;
}
Great! our app now has routing! is time to take a break again, go and grab some lunch! , You want to continue? ok as a bonus let’s add a really simple Controller, this might be useful in the future if you want to use a template engine like Twig
create App/Controller/Home.php
and modify the Router::get('/',..)
in the index.php
with
use App\Controller\Home;Router::get('/', function () {
(new Home())->indexAction();
});
Implementing our Blog API
Finally!, we are almost over!, in these steps, we are finally implementing our Blog API, thanks to our Router, the next steps will be easy,
We will have three endpoints
- GET
/post
, list all the available post - POST
/post
, Create a new Post - GET
/post/{id}
show and specific post
First, we need our Posts
model to handle these operations and then be called from our router
create App/Model/Posts.php
create a db.json
file in the root of the project and paste this so we can have a content already to test
[
{
"id": 1,
"title": "My Post 1",
"body": "My First Content"
}
]
modify our config.php
to add the DB_PATH
<?php
return [
'LOG_PATH' => __DIR__ . './logs',
'DB_PATH' => __DIR__ . '/db.json'
];
with this we already have our “DB” setup, now we need to use it with our router, let’s modify our index.php
to add the routes and DB call respectively
in this step, we added Posts::load()
to load our “DB” from the db.json
file and created three routes GET /post
to list, POST /post
to create and GET/post/([0–9]*)
to get a specific post, you could move the Posts::load()
inside our App::run
method to make it cleaner.
Great! let’s test it!, you could use postman, curl, to simulate the POST request
List all posts curl -X GET http://localhost:8000/post
should output:
[{"id":1,"title":"My Post 1","body":"My First Content"}]
List one post curl -X GET http://localhost:8000/post/1
should output:
{"id":1,"title":"My Post 1","body":"My First Content"}
Create a post
curl -X POST \
http://localhost:8000/post \
-H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
-d '{"title": "Hello World", "body": "My Content"}'
Finally! is finished! we have our Blog Api working! if you manage to follow along until here and you didn’t get bored, Congrats once again!, but before we wrap up, let’s add some testing and I promise we’ll finish
Adding Testing
Ok, we got this far, so let’s implement some testing, for this step, I will test only our Router.php
with simple cases and the code styling based on psr-2
coding style standard, but you should take the time to test as much you can in your app, my intention is just to show you how to add this into our app and CI
we need to add some package into our project, type
composer require --dev squizlabs/php_codesniffer
composer require --dev peridot-php/peridot
composer require --dev peridot-php/leo
composer require --dev eloquent/phony-peridot
run in the terminal ./vendor/bin/phpcs — standard=psr2 App/
to check if any code syntax is wrong, this will be part of our test script, but try to run it now, in case you have only white-spaces errors, you could use ./vendor/bin/phpcbf — standard=psr2 App/
to fix it automatically
for unit testing, we are going to use my personal choice peridot
but you could use any you feel comfortable, besides peridot, we have two plugins leo
provides expect
functionality and phony-peridot
provides stubs
functionality that is very handy to check if a function was called
create Test/Router.spec.php
modify the composer.json
and add this section below
"scripts": {
"test": [
"./vendor/bin/phpcs --standard=psr2 App/",
"./vendor/bin/peridot Test/"
]
},
now to run the test, you could just type ./vendor/bin/peridot Test/
or composer run-script test
or even shorter with composer test
all of them would do the same if everything went right you see this
Conclusions
This was a very simple project and a lot of things was left out to keep the article shorter as possible, but you could use it as a base and extended it by adding a better router, an ORM, template engine, and so forth, take time and check https://packagist.org/explore/popular or The League of Extraordinary Packages (thephpleague.com)
All code is available in https://gitlab.com/dhgouveia/medium-blog-api
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