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Big Give Mailer

Mailer is a Slim PHP microservice for queueing, rendering and sending emails.

It uses Twig for email templating with the inliner extension to support clean styling that works in most email clients.

It supports any SMTP transport, via Symfony Mailer, but we currently use AWS SES.

It supports SQS and Redis queues via Symfony Messenger.

Run the app

You should usually use Docker to run the app locally in an easy way, with the least possible configuration and the most consistency with other runtime environments - both those used when the app is deployed 'for real' and other developers' machines.

Prerequisites

In advance of the first app run:

  • get Docker
  • copy .env.example to .env and change any values you need to

Start the app

To start the app and its dependencies locally:

docker compose up -d web

First run

To get PHP dependencies in place, you'll need to run this once:

docker compose exec web composer install

If dependencies change externally you may occasionally need to re-run the command.

Run unit tests

Once you have the app running, you can test with:

docker compose exec web composer run test

Linting is run with

docker compose exec web composer run lint:check

To understand how these commands are run in CI, see the CircleCI config file.

API

Actions are annotated with swagger-php -ready doc block annotations.

Generate OpenAPI documentation corresponding to your local codebase with:

docker compose exec web composer run docs

The latest stable docs should be copied to their live home on SwaggerHub after any changes.

Service dependencies

Queues

SQS is used to queue messages on AWS, and Redis locally. The two reasons to use a queue like this are:

  • Fast response times. While TBG Mailer is healthy it responds quickly, regardless of the speed of SES API responses or any issues with our account standing that might delay the actual sending of emails.
  • Reliability. If an SES send fails for any reason, the message goes back on the queue and will be sent once we / Amazon fix the problem.

Message properties are the key placeholders needed for the template / subject line, and the recipient's email address.

Scripts and Docker

Scripts are defined in composer.json. The only one designed to run in production is messenger:consume, which sets up and runs Symfony Messenger's built-in ConsumeMessagesCommand, which starts a long-lived process to listen to the queue for any emails that are ready to render and send. See Console to understand how the command is bootstrapped.

Discovering more about scripts

There is a Composer script list-commands which calls list to read the registered commands. With an already-running Docker web container, you can run

docker compose exec web composer list-commands

Currently we define no custom commands, instead pulling in the Symfony dependencies necessary to use the symfony/messenger component and its built-in commands.

Running scripts locally

To run a consumer worker similarly to how our ECS tasks will (distinct from the web container), run:

docker compose run --rm consumer

As you can see in docker-compose.yml, this is just a shortcut to get a standalone CLI process to run the long-running worker task defined with composer run messenger:consume.

How tasks run on staging & production

ECS task invocations are configured to keep at least one consumer task running. Tasks get their own ECS cluster/service to run on, independent of the web cluster.

Code structure

Mailer's code is organisation is loosely based on the Slim Skeleton, and elements like the error & shutdown handlers and much of the project structure follow its conventions.

Generally this structure follows normal conventions for a modern PHP app:

  • Dependencies are defined (only) in composer.json, including PHP version and extensions
  • Source code lives in src
  • PHPUnit tests live in tests, at a path matching that of the class they cover in src
  • Slim configuration logic and routing live in app

Configuration in app

  • dependencies.php: this sets up dependency injection (DI) for the whole app. This determines how every class gets the stuff it needs to run. DI is super powerful because of its flexibility (a class can say I want a logger and not worry about which one), and typically avoids objects being created that aren't actually needed, or being created more times than needed. Both of these files work the same way - they are only separate for cleaner organisation.

    We use Slim's PSR-11 compliant Container with PHP-DI. There's an overview here of what this means in the context of Slim v4.

    With PHP-DI, by tuning dependencies to be more class-based we could potentially eliminate some of our explicit depenendency definitions in the future by taking better advantage of autowiring.

  • routes.php: this small file defines every route exposed on the web, and every authentication rule that applies to them. The latter is controlled by PSR-15 middleware and is very important to keep in the right place!

    Slim uses methods like get(...) and put(...) to hook up specific HTTP methods to classes that should be invoked. Our Actions' boilerplate is set up so that when the class is invoked, its action(...) method does the heavy lifting to serve the request.

    add(...) is responsible for adding middleware. It can apply to a single route or a whole group of them. Again, this is how we make routes authenticated. Modify with caution!

  • settings.php: you won't normally need to do much with this directly because it mostly just re-structures environment variables found in .env (locally) or env vars loaded from a secrets file (on ECS), into formats expected by classes we feed config arrays.

Important code

The most important areas to explore in src are:

  • Application\Actions: all classes exposing APIs to the world. Anything invoked directly by a Route should be here.
  • Application\Commands: all classes extending Command (we use the Symfony Console component). Every custom script we invoke and anything extending Command should be here.

Deployment

Deploys are rolled out by CirlceCI, as configured here, to an ECS cluster, where instances run the app live inside Docker containers.

As you can see in the configuration file,

  • develop commits trigger deploys to staging and regression environments; and
  • main commits trigger deploys to production

These branches are protected on GitHub and you should have a good reason for skipping any checks before merging to them!

ECS runtime containers

ECS builds have two additional steps compared to a local run:

  • during build, the Dockerfile adds the AWS CLI for S3 secrets access, pulls in the app files, tweaks temporary directory permissions and runs composer install. These things don't happen automatically with the base PHP image as they don't usually make sense for local runs;
  • during startup, the entrypoint scripts load in runtime secrets securely from S3 and ensure some cache directories have appropriate permissions. This is handled in the two .sh scripts in deploy - one for web instances and one for tasks.

Phased deploys

Other AWS infrastructure includes a load balancer, and ECS rolls out new app versions gradually to try and keep a working version live even if a broken release is ever deployed. Because of this, new code may not reach all users until about 30 minutes after CircleCI reports that a deploy is done. You can monitor this in the AWS Console.

When things are working correctly, any environment with at least two tasks in its ECS Service should get new app versions with no downtime.