Last Updated on January 28, 2019 by Brad Cypert

Alright, at it again with another PHP post. Hopefully this doesn’t dislodge my blog from the planet.clojure.in newsletter from writing too much non-clojure. The other day I wrote a post about using Slim with Eloquent to build a simple API. It was a fun project and I decided to share it with the PHP subreddit. Thankfully, the PHP community is far better than I remembered it — we created a lot of great feedback and had a few discussions about Lumen.

What is Lumen, you ask? Well, it’s a microframework (like Slim) but comes bundled with Eloquent (the ORM we used in our last tutorial). It’s also from the team that brought you Laravel. In fact, one of the big selling points for Lumen (although the community seems disjointed on agreeing with this) is that upgrading from Lumen to Laravel should be an easy transition.

My post for you today is simple — We’ll take my last post and just write it with Lumen instead. We won’t have to tackle that weird ExceptionHandler issue for Eloquent and I enjoyed the syntax even more with Lumen than I did with Slim. Hopefully, you’ll enjoy it too!

Getting Started

For this tutorial, we’re going to use PHP-7.1 and Lumen-5.3.3. We’re also going to use a Postgres database.

We’re breaking up our code into separate files but most of the Slim logic will be contained in a single file. If you’re not using PHP’s package manager, Composer, you definitely should. It’ll help with this tutorial a lot. In fact, we’ll start by having composer manage our dependencies for us!

Note: I’ve installed Composer via homebrew (arguably a weird way to use Composer, but I prefer to use a package manager to install my package managers). If you aren’t using Homebrew, you’ll probably have to use php composer.phar ${my-commands-here} instead of my example. It also looks like Lumen has a tool to help us with scaffolding out a project. Let’s install that now.

composer global require "laravel/lumen-installer"

You’ll likely need to add your composer global directory to your path which you can do like so (provided you’ve got your composer directory in the same location):

Then you should be able to run a command to generate our lumen project. I’ll call mine lumen-test because why not?

lumen new lumen-test

Awesome. You can launch the current app by changing to the lumen-test directory and using php -S localhost:8000 -t public to make sure everything runs out of the box.

We’ll end up using the same database and table from our previous post (so please don’t mind the references to slim). Here’s a picture of the schema once more.





Alright, let’s setup our server config so we have access to our database.

The Config

The config for our server is contained in a .env file. If you’ve scaffolded the project, you’ll see a .env_example file. Feel free to copy that file to a new .env file.

cp .env_example .env

Crack open that .env file and let’s setup our database. Your file (provided you’re using the same database config as I am) should look something like this.

APP_ENV=local APP_DEBUG=true APP_KEY= APP_TIMEZONE=UTC DB_CONNECTION=pgsql DB_HOST=127.0.0.1 DB_PORT=5432 DB_DATABASE=slim_test DB_USERNAME=slim2 DB_PASSWORD=nopassword CACHE_DRIVER=memcached QUEUE_DRIVER=sync

And that’s it for our config.

The Magic

My rule for Microframeworks is that they should have minimal “magic”. Slim felt pretty “magic-less” and Lumen has until this point as wel (but we’ve really only written a config). Eloquent support comes out of the box when creating a new Lumen app, but we have to activate it. Open up bootstrap/app.php and find the following line:

// $app->withEloquent();

Simply uncomment that line and your app hookup Eloquent to the database that you’ve configured in your .env file. Feel free to look around this file, there’s a few other options here that you can setup if you’d like such as Middleware or Facades.

The PHP

Alright, let’s write all of our PHP for this project. It’s not bad at all, should be easy to understand, and (for simplicity) we’ll be able to keep it all in one file. Let’s go ahead and start by modifying public/index.php .

<?php use IlluminateHttpRequest; $app = require __DIR__.'/../bootstrap/app.php'; class Dev extends IlluminateDatabaseEloquentModel { protected $table = 'devs'; }

We’re starting a new PHP document using the annoying <?php half-tag that we never close, defining Request as IlluminateHttpRequest, bootstrapping our application based off of the file we just touched, and then defining our “magic” model. The model has it’s table set to devs and the rest is handled for us by Eloquent.

Let’s start with something basic. We’ll go ahead and define our behavior for a GET request to retrieve all the developers from our database. That part is really cool, as Eloquent plays very nicely with the Lumen request/response objects.

$app->get('dev', function() { return response()->json(Dev::all()); });

Simple right? This looks great. It’s obvious as to what is happening and what is being returned. Actually, it’s not that obvious. The response() being called with no parameters actually leverages the Lumen contracts system and returns a ResponseFactory. The responseFactory has a json() method and that builds a response from the given object (in our case, an array). Despite that “magic”, this knowledge isn’t too necessary in most cases and allows us to write really concise callbacks for our routes. Overall, I like it.

Let’s go ahead and add the code to perform a get using an ID to lookup a specific developer.

$app->get('dev/{id}', function($id) { return response()->json(Dev::find($id)); });

This should also be pretty obvious, but let’s go over it! We’re mostly doing the same thing as before, except this time we have a route parameter. We’re expecting an id to be passed in on our route so we could match against dev/1 or even dev/frank . We can fine tune this as well, but I’ll cover that in another post. For now, we’ll take that id in our callback and find the specific developer with that id . Moving onto a POST .

$app->post('dev', function(Request $request) { $dev = new Dev(); $dev->name = $request->input('name'); $dev->focus = $request->input('focus'); $dev->hireDate = $request->input('hireDate'); $dev->save(); return response()->json($dev, 201); });

With the post, we’re listening on the dev route again, but you’ll notice our callback is actually taking in a Request object. You’ll remember from earlier that we wrote use IlluminateHttpRequest; . This means that the request in this context is of type IlluminateHttpRequest . Next, we create a new developer object, then we peel the name , focus , and hireDate from the request object and assign them the respective fields for the $dev object. We then save the $dev object to the database and then return it with a 201 to signify that it’s been created. We can add a developer, but now we need to delete one from our database. Let’s make that route.

$app->delete('dev/{id}', function($id) { Dev::find($id)->delete(); return response('', 200); });

Short and sweet. We’re able to take an ID, listen for a delete request on the dev/{id} route and then find that developer in the db and issue a delete on it. Eloquent takes care of the rest from here and then we return a successful response. What about a patch?

$app->patch('dev/{id}', function(Request $request, $id) { $dev = Dev::find($id); $dev->name = $request->input('name', $dev->name); $dev->focus = $request->input('focus', $dev->focus); $dev->hireDate = $request->input('hireDate', $dev->hireDate); $dev->save(); return response()->json($dev); });

In this route, you’ll see we’re listening on dev/{id} again, but this time for a patch. We’re taking in the Request object once more (as we’ll need to extract data from it) and then the $id . We’re updating the values of the developer for that given id and then saving it. You’ll notice that we’re passing in a second parameter to $request->input(); . That second parameter is the “default” value. If there is no data for ‘name’ for example, it’ll return $dev->name . This allows us to only update the values that are passed to us in our request. We then save it like before, and return the updated object. The last piece is up next, I swear!

$app->run();

And that’s it! That last line runs our application! The entire public/index.php file is here below for you to inspect in one solid piece.

<?php use IlluminateHttpRequest; $app = require __DIR__.'/../bootstrap/app.php'; class Dev extends IlluminateDatabaseEloquentModel { protected $table = 'devs'; } $app->get('dev', function() { return response()->json(Dev::all()); }); $app->get('dev/{id}', function($id) { return response()->json(Dev::find($id)); }); $app->post('dev', function(Request $request) { $dev = new Dev(); $dev->name = $request->input('name'); $dev->focus = $request->input('focus'); $dev->hireDate = $request->input('hireDate'); $dev->save(); return response()->json($dev, 201); }); $app->delete('dev/{id}', function($id) { Dev::find($id)->delete(); return response('', 200); }); $app->patch('dev/{id}', function(Request $request, $id) { $dev = Dev::find($id); $dev->name = $request->input('name', $dev->name); $dev->focus = $request->input('focus', $dev->focus); $dev->hireDate = $request->input('hireDate', $dev->hireDate); $dev->save(); return response()->json($dev); }); $app->run();

I hope this tutorial was as helpful as the last one! Have a comment? Let me know below! Thanks again for reading! If you’d like to learn more about PHP, you can find more of most posts on the matter here!