Zend Expressive Doctrine API

This project is a skeleton application for building web APIs using Zend Expressive and Doctrine as data persistence layer.

It is (still) a POC (Proof Of Concept) and is under development.

Context

The initiative came from Enrico Zimuel when he introduced Zend Expressive API not long ago. Based on this initiative, I decided to take it a step further by adding Doctrine features. Those spikes are aimed to be a playground for Apigility 2.0 release. See credits for other contributions.

Getting started

First, you need to use Composer to setup the project. Install dependencies by running the following command:

$ composer install

Upon completion, Phing will be available. Get the list of available tasks by typing:

$ ./vendor/bin/phing

You have to create the database structure. Run the following:

$ ./vendor/bin/phing create-db

Usage

Start the project by launching the embedded PHP webserver:

$ composer serve

You now have access to endpoints through http://localhost:8080/api/blog. To make the calls, use any HTTP client you like.

For the sake of this documentation, examples will be requested with HTTPie.

The Web API example

I chose to demonstrate API CRUD operations through 2 resources: Blog post and authors.

First things first, let's create an author.

$ http POST http://localhost:8080/api/authors name=Julien twitter=julienguittard --json

Success response of a resource creation is a 201:

HTTP/1.1 201 Created
Connection: close
Content-Length: 0
Content-type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
Host: localhost:8080
Location: /api/authors/c2f11204-f9e4-4f87-8ae6-1a17dd729dea

Note that instead of returning the entity representation, location header contains the URI from which you can then fetch it.

Let's try to delete this author now:

$ http DELETE http://localhost:8080/api/authors/c2f11204-f9e4-4f87-8ae6-1a17dd729dea

Oops...

HTTP/1.1 405 Method Not Allowed
Allow: GET
Connection: close
Content-Length: 18
Content-type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
Host: localhost:8080

Method Not Allowed

Never mind, let's create a post:

$ http POST http://localhost:8080/api/posts title="Lorem ipsum" body="Once upon a time, there was a prince..." author=c2f11204-f9e4-4f87-8ae6-1a17dd729dea --json

So far, so good:

HTTP/1.1 201 Created
Connection: close
Content-Length: 0
Content-type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
Host: localhost:8080
Location: /api/posts/b454e1ea-06b8-453a-8f70-23cd521283c5

Should we want a list of all of them:

$ http GET http://localhost:8080/api/posts

What's inside?