Laravel Base Repositories

A set of base repository interfaces and default implementations for Laravel applications.

Installing

Require this package in your composer.json file:

{
	"require-dev": {
		"antarctica/laravel-base-repositories": "~0.2"
	}
}

Run composer update.

Usage

BaseRepositoryInterface

This package provides a very minimal interface of required methods for an abstract repository. That it is to say to aims to describe most of the basic/fundamental methods a typical repository/model would need.

For example: find resource x or create a resource.

Where a repository needs more specialised methods, to suit its particular needs, these can be added either directly to a repository class or to another interface that extends this one (if these extra methods are needed by other repositories).

Essentially this base interface is designed to provide the most common functionality that will almost certainly be needed.

See BaseRepositoryInterface.php for the specific methods this interface requires, each is documented inline using PHP DocBlocks.

Return types

In order to provide as neutral an interface as possible, data MUST be returned as PHP standard arrays.

This is to ensure implementations remain interoperable with each other by using a lowest common denominator approach.

This is specified within the implementation through type hinted DocBlock properties. However these rely on a either manual validation or features provided by your editor to be enforced.

Basic usage (Laravel)

<?php

use Antarctica\LaravelBaseRepositories\Repository\BaseRepositoryInterface;

abstract class BaseRepositoryEloquent implements BaseRepositoryInterface {

}

BaseRepositoryEloquent

This package provides a default implementation of the BaseRepositoryInterface using Laravel's Eloquent ORM.

This class uses a given Eloquent model to implement the required repository methods in their most basic form.

E.g. the all() method returns $this->model->all(); without any default where clauses, sorting etc.

Essentially this base implementation is designed to prevent you having to write implementations for basic functions (such as delete) to allow you to focus on the cases where you need custom functionality.

This provides a neutral base which more targeted specific classes can extend to target the methods they need, rather than implementing of the required methods that may be no different than normal.

See BaseRepositoryEloquent.php for details on how each method is implemented, PHP DocBlocks are used to document each method inline.

Return types

To ensure all methods return data in the format data type/structure a common export() method is used. This method accepts data in a variety of types (such as an Eloquent collection) and provides functionality to convert these complex data structures into a standard array.

It is possible to extend this function (currently only by replacement) to add support for other input types as needed.

Basic usage (Laravel)

<?php

use Antarctica\LaravelBaseRepositories\Repository\BaseRepositoryEloquent;
use User;

class UserRepositoryEloquent extends BaseRepositoryEloquent {

    /**
     * @var User
     */
    protected $model;

    /**
     * @param User $model
     */
    function __construct(User $model)
    {
        $this->model = $model;
    }
}

Contributing

This project welcomes contributions, see CONTRIBUTING for our general policy.

Developing

To aid development and keep your local computer clean, a VM (managed by Vagrant) is used to create an isolated environment with all necessary tools/libraries available.

Requirements

• Mac OS X
• Ansible brew install ansible
• VMware Fusion
• Vagrant brew cask install vmware-fusion vagrant
• Host manager and Vagrant VMware plugins vagrant plugin install vagrant-hostmanager && vagrant plugin install vagrant-vmware-fusion
• You have a private key id_rsa and public key id_rsa.pub in ~/.ssh/
• You have an entry like [1] in your ~/.ssh/config

[1] SSH config entry

Host bslweb-*
    ForwardAgent yes
    User app
    IdentityFile ~/.ssh/id_rsa
    Port 22

Provisioning development VM

VMs are managed using Vagrant and configured by Ansible.

$ git clone ssh://git@stash.ceh.ac.uk:7999/basweb/laravel-base-repositories.git
$ cp ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub laravel-base-repositories/provisioning/public_keys/
$ cd laravel-base-repositories
$ ./armadillo_standin.sh

$ vagrant up

$ ssh bslweb-laravel-base-repositories-dev-node1
$ cd /app

$ composer install

$ logout

Committing changes

The Git flow workflow is used to manage development of this package.

Discrete changes should be made within feature branches, created from and merged back into develop (where small one-line changes may be made directly).

When ready to release a set of features/changes create a release branch from develop, update documentation as required and merge into master with a tagged, semantic version (e.g. v1.2.3).

After releases the master branch should be merged with develop to restart the process. High impact bugs can be addressed in hotfix branches, created from and merged into master directly (and then into develop).

Issue tracking

Issues, bugs, improvements, questions, suggestions and other tasks related to this package are managed through the BAS Web & Applications Team Jira project (BASWEB).

Clean up

To remove the development VM:

vagrant halt
vagrant destroy

The laravel-base-repositories directory can then be safely deleted as normal.

License

Copyright 2014 NERC BAS. Licensed under the MIT license, see LICENSE for details.