laravel-memcached-plus

Summary

Integrating with cloud memcached services such as MemCachier and memcached cloud can require memcached features not available with the built-in Laravel 5 Cache memcached driver.

These include:

• SASL authentication
• custom options
• persistent connections

Adding 3 new configuration items, this package enhances the built-in Laravel 5 Cache memcached driver. Optionally, this package also allows these extra configuration items to be used for memcached Sessions.

Read on for detailed instructions - you may find it useful to reference the demo app at the same time.

Update: see here for details on the PRs I submitted to laravel/framework.

Requirements

• = PHP 5.4 with ext-memcached

• To use SASL it must be compiled with SASL support. This is the default on Heroku

Installation

Available to install as a Composer package on Packagist, all you need to do is:

composer require b3it/laravel-memcached-plus

If your local environment does not meet the requirements you may need to append the ignore-platform-reqs option:

composer require b3it/laravel-memcached-plus --ignore-platform-reqs

Configuration

Once installed you can use this package to enhance the Laravel Cache and Session services.

Providers

This section discusses the Laravel application configuration file app/config.php.

In the providers array you need to replace following built-in Service Providers:

• Illuminate\Cache\CacheServiceProvider and (optionally)
• Illuminate\Session\SessionServiceProvider

A recommended approach is to comment out the built-in providers and append the Service Providers from this package:

'providers' => [
    ...
    //'Illuminate\Cache\CacheServiceProvider',
    ...
    //'Illuminate\Session\SessionServiceProvider',
    ...

    /*
     * Application Service Providers...
     */
     ...

    'B3IT\MemcachedPlus\CacheServiceProvider',
    'B3IT\MemcachedPlus\SessionServiceProvider',
],

On a fresh install of Laravel 5.0.13 the providers array is on line 111 of app/config.php.

The B3IT\MemcachedPlus\SessionServiceProvider is optional. You only need to add this if:

• You want to specify the memcached store to use for sessions, or
• You want to use the memcached features provided by this package for sessions

Cache

This section discusses the Laravel cache configuration file config/cache.php.

This package makes the following extra configuration items are available for use with a memcached store:

• persistent_id - [Memcached::__construct] (http://php.net/manual/en/memcached.construct.php) explains how this is used
• sasl - used by Memcached::setSaslAuthData
• options - see Memcached::setOptions

These may be used in a store config like so:

'stores' => [
    'memcachedstorefoo' => [
        'driver'  => 'memcached',
        'persistent_id' => 'laravel',
        'sasl'       => [
            env('MEMCACHIER_USERNAME'),
            env('MEMCACHIER_PASSWORD')
        ],
        'options'    => [
            'OPT_NO_BLOCK'         => true,
            'OPT_AUTO_EJECT_HOSTS' => true,
            'OPT_CONNECT_TIMEOUT'  => 2000,
            'OPT_POLL_TIMEOUT'     => 2000,
            'OPT_RETRY_TIMEOUT'    => 2,
        ],
        'servers' => [
            [
                'host' => '127.0.0.1', 'port' => 11211, 'weight' => 100
            ],
        ],
    ],
],

When defining options you should set the config key to the Memcached constant name as a string. This avoids any issues with local environments missing ext-memcached and throwing a warning about undefined constants. The config keys are automatically resolved into Memcached constants by the MemcachedPlus\MemcachedConnector which throws a RuntimeException if the constant is invalid.

Note that as this package enhances the built-in Laravel 5 memcached Cache driver the driver string remains memcached.

In case you are unfamiliar with how to use multiple cache stores in Laravel, you would access this store from your application code like so:

$value = Cache::store('memcachedstorefoo')->get('key');

Session

This section discusses the Laravel session configuration file config/session.php.

If you are using memcached sessions you will have set the driver configuration item to 'memcached'.

If you have added the B3IT\MemcachedPlus\SessionServiceProvider as discussed above, the memcached_store configuration item is available. This is explained in the following new snippet you can paste into your session configuration file:

    /*
    |--------------------------------------------------------------------------
    | Session Cache Store
    |--------------------------------------------------------------------------
    |
    | When using the "memcached" session driver, you may specify a cache store
    | that should be used for these sessions. This should correspond to a
    | store in your cache configuration options which uses the memcached
    | driver.
    |
    */

    'memcached_store' => 'memcachier',

laravel-memcached-plus in action

I created a demo app for you to see how this package integrates with Laravel 5 and how you could run it on Heroku.

Integration with laravel/framework

I submitted 2 PRs to laravel/framework to integrate this package in to the framework itself:

• Memcached persistent connections, SASL authentication and custom options: #7987 and
• Memcached Session store configuration #7988

However @taylorotwell closed them due to lack of tests. When time permits I'm planning to add tests and re-submit, but in the meantime if anyone wishes to contribute them please submit a PR.

Support

Please do let me know if you have any comments or queries.

Thanks!