Apigility Skeleton Application

Requirements

Please see the composer.json file.

Installation

Via release tarball

Grab the latest release via the Apigility website and/or the releases page; each release has distribution tarballs and zipballs available.

Untar it:

tar xzf zf-apigility-skeleton-{version}.tgz

(Where {version} is the version you downloaded.)

Or unzip, if you chose the zipball:

unzip zf-apigility-skeleton-{version}.zip

(Where {version} is the version you downloaded.)

Via Composer (create-project)

You can use the create-project command from Composer to create the project in one go (you need to install composer.phar):

curl -s https://getcomposer.org/installer | php --
php composer.phar create-project -sdev zfcampus/zf-apigility-skeleton path/to/install

Via Git (clone)

First, clone the repository:

git clone https://github.com/zfcampus/zf-apigility-skeleton.git # optionally, specify the directory in which to clone
cd path/to/install

At this point, you need to use Composer to install dependencies. Assuming you already have Composer:

composer.phar install

All methods

Once you have the basic installation, you need to put it in development mode:

cd path/to/install
php public/index.php development enable # put the skeleton in development mode

Now, fire it up! Do one of the following:

• Create a vhost in your web server that points the DocumentRoot to the public/ directory of the project
• Fire up the built-in web server in PHP (5.4.8+) (note: do not use this for production!)

In the latter case, do the following:

cd path/to/install
php -S 0.0.0.0:8080 -ddisplay_errors=0 -t public public/index.php

You can then visit the site at http://localhost:8080/ - which will bring up a welcome page and the ability to visit the dashboard in order to create and inspect your APIs.

NOTE ABOUT USING THE PHP BUILT-IN WEB SERVER

PHP's built-in web server did not start supporting the PATCH HTTP method until 5.4.8. Since the admin API makes use of this HTTP method, you must use a version >= 5.4.8 when using the built-in web server.

NOTE ABOUT USING APACHE

Apache forbids the character sequences %2F and %5C in URI paths. However, the Apigility Admin API uses these characters for a number of service endpoints. As such, if you wish to use the Admin UI and/or Admin API with Apache, you will need to configure your Apache vhost/project to allow encoded slashes:

AllowEncodedSlashes On

This change will need to be made in your server's vhost file (it cannot be added to .htaccess).

NOTE ABOUT OPCACHE

Disable all opcode caches when running the admin!

The admin cannot and will not run correctly when an opcode cache, such as APC or OpCache, is enabled. Apigility does not use a database to store configuration; instead, it uses PHP configuration files. Opcode caches will cache these files on first load, leading to inconsistencies as you write to them, and will typically lead to a state where the admin API and code become unusable.

The admin is a development tool, and intended for use a development environment. As such, you should likely disable opcode caching, regardless.

When you are ready to deploy your API to production, however, you can disable development mode, thus disabling the admin interface, and safely run an opcode cache again. Doing so is recommended for production due to the tremendous performance benefits opcode caches provide.

NOTE ABOUT DISPLAY_ERRORS

The display_errors php.ini setting is useful in development to understand what warnings, notices, and error conditions are affecting your application. However, they cause problems for APIs: APIs are typically a specific serialization format, and error reporting is usually in either plain text, or, with extensions like XDebug, in HTML. This breaks the response payload, making it unusable by clients.

For this reason, we recommend disabling display_errors when using the Apigility admin interface. This can be done using the -ddisplay_errors=0 flag when using the built-in PHP web server, or you can set it in your virtual host or server definition. If you disable it, make sure you have reasonable error log settings in place. For the built-in PHP web server, errors will be reported in the console itself; otherwise, ensure you have an error log file specified in your configuration.

display_errors should never be enabled in production, regardless.

Vagrant

If you prefer to develop with Vagrant, there is a basic vagrant recipe included with this project.

This recipe assumes that you already have Vagrant installed. The virtual machine will try to use localhost:8080 by default, so if you already have a server on this port of your host machine, you need to shut down the conflicting server first, or if you know how, you can reconfigure the ports in Vagrantfile.

Assuming you have Vagrant installed and assuming you have no port conflicts, you can bring up the Vagrant machine with the standard up command:

vagrant up

When the machine comes up, you can ssh to it with the standard ssh forward agent:

vagrant ssh

The web root is inside the shared directory, which is at /vagrant. Once you've ssh'd into the box, you need to cd:

cd /vagrant

For vagrant documentation, please refer to vagrantup.com

Docker

If you develop or deploy using Docker, we provide both development and production configuration for you.

Development

Prepare your development environment using docker compose:

git clone https://github.com/zfcampus/zf-apigility-skeleton

cd zf-apigility-skeleton

docker-compose build

Start the development environment:

docker-compose up

Access your editor from http://localhost:8080/ or http://<boot2docker ip>:8080/ if on Windows or Mac.

Production

Use the included Dockerfile to build an Apache container:

docker build -t apighost .

Test your container:

docker run -it -p "80:80" apighost