Restler 4 Application with Eloquent

Api server boilerplate with database support for Luracast Restler

Restler is an "API First Micro Framework" that offers better web api by design.

Every branch in this git repository contains different application templates to suit your specific needs.

Eloquent App provides laravel 7 database support for your restler 4 application development

Installation

Make sure PHP 7.3 or above is available on your server

Composer is used to manage the dependencies. If you don't already have composer installed, we recommend installing it globally

Install Composer

Instructions to install composer globally are available in getcomposer.org

Install Restler Application Template

Download as zip, and unzip or clone this repository in your development machine.

rename the folder to match your application

open terminal inside this newly created folder

composer install

This will install all the dependencies

What's in it?

Eloquent Application Template offers lluminate Database support along with Migration, Seeding and Artisan.

Note:- This template is built using Laravel Database

Laravel is a web application framework with expressive, elegant syntax. We extracted the database functionality from it and made it available for restler

The Illuminate Database component is a full database toolkit for PHP, providing an expressive query builder, ActiveRecord style ORM, and schema builder. It currently supports MySQL, Postgres, SQL Server, and SQLite.

We combined it with Illuminate FileSystem and Illuminate Console to make Artisan work with database related commands.

There is a sample API Class called Home in app/Http/Controllers directory that has the following success message for the /home/ of the API.

{
    "success": {
        "code": 200,
        "message": "Restler is up and running!"
    }
}

On your development machine, you can run the development server by running the php artisan serve on the project root. This will run the php development server at port 8000 on localhost by default. If you need to change that you may use the command line options as shown below

php artisan serve --port=8080

This project also comes with swagger ui for testing and documenting the api. You can access that using the following url

http://localhost:8000/

How it works?

index.php in the public folder includes the autoload.php in bootstrap folder which internally uses composer autoloader. This enables lazy loading for all db related classes. Only when you call one of the DB related class, database engine is initialized.

More Documentation

Refer to all database related sections on Laravel 7 website.

What to do next?

This app uses sqlite database by default. So make sure the file exists by running the following command in the terminal

touch database/database.sqlite

Note:- Feel free to change the database by using an .env file or editing config/database.php

Check the database connection with the following command.

php artisan migrate:install

Migration table created successfully.

Next you will create a migration file for creating the new table, how about creating an API for writing reviews?

php artisan make:migration --create=reviews create_reviews_table

Created Migration: Created Migration: 2020_08_11_153927_create_reviews_table

Edit the database/migrations/Created Migration: 2020_08_11_153927_create_reviews_table file to have the following content

Note:- date and time of calling the command will change the file name accordingly

<?php

use Illuminate\Database\Migrations\Migration;
use Illuminate\Database\Schema\Blueprint;
use Illuminate\Support\Facades\Schema;

class CreateReviewsTable extends Migration
{
    /**
     * Run the migrations.
     *
     * @return void
     */
    public function up()
    {
        Schema::create('reviews', function (Blueprint $table) {
            $table->id();
            $table->string('name');
            $table->string('email');
            $table->text('message');
            $table->timestamps();
        });
    }

    /**
     * Reverse the migrations.
     *
     * @return void
     */
    public function down()
    {
        Schema::dropIfExists('reviews');
    }
}

Here we are creating reviews table with the name, email, and message columns. Next we will run the migration tool so that this table will actually be created.

php artisan migrate

Migrating: 2014_10_12_000000_create_users_table
Migrated:  2014_10_12_000000_create_users_table (0.01 seconds)
Migrating: 2014_10_12_100000_create_password_resets_table
Migrated:  2014_10_12_100000_create_password_resets_table (0 seconds)
Migrating: 2020_08_11_153927_create_reviews_table
Migrated:  2020_08_11_153927_create_reviews_table (0 seconds)

Next let us create a model class and controller class in one go

php artisan make:controller Reviews -m Review

 A App\Review model does not exist. Do you want to generate it? (yes/no) [yes]:
 > yes

Model created successfully.
Controller created successfully.

We basically created a Reviews controller class in app/Http/Controllers/Reviews.php along with a model class in app/Review.php

Take a look at those files to understand what they do

<?php

namespace App;

use Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Model;

/**
 * Class Review
 *
 * @property-read  int    $id
 * @property       string $name
 * @property       string $email
 * @property       string $message
 * @property-read  string $created_at {@type date}
 * @property-read  string $updated_at {@type date}
 * 
 */
 class Review extends Model
{
  //...
} 

As you can see the model class has @property comments that links it to the database table structure we created earlier with a migration

Lets add this new controller class and remove Home in /routes/api.php

<?php

use App\Http\Controllers\Home;
use App\Http\Controllers\Reviews;
use Luracast\Restler\Defaults;
use Luracast\Restler\OpenApi3\Explorer;
use Luracast\Restler\Router;

try {
    Defaults::$productionMode = getenv('APP_ENV') == 'production';
    Router::mapApiClasses([
        '' => Explorer::class,
        //Home::class,
        Reviews::class,
    ]);
    $routes = Router::toArray();
} catch (Throwable $throwable) {
    die($throwable->getMessage() . PHP_EOL);
}

And then run the server again with php artisan serve

You will see the following

Create few reviews by calling POST /reviews in explorer

You will see the listing api as follows when you expand GET /reviews

It will be great if we can paginate our listing, right?

Lets re-generate the controller class with pagination

php artisan make:controller Reviews -m Review -p

Controller already exists!

php artisan make:controller Reviews -m Review -p --force

Controller created successfully.

Note the addition of -p to paginate and --force to
force overwriting the controller class.

Now we have pagination support as shown below

Production Mode

Make sure all the folders inside storage/framework/cache have write permission for the application to write the needed files for caching

Create .env by cloning .env.example

cp .env.example .env

and update the environment as follows

APP_ENV=production

You may also update the database configuration inside the .env file

Now Restler should be running in production mode and laravel related components are running under production environment!

Note:- when running in production mode restler won't detect addition or removal of an api. You need to manually delete the cache files under storage/framework/cache