Slim v4 Skeleton API

Configuration

The directory for all configuration files is: config/ In this file are the core files for running the application.

• settings.php: Manages all core settings and environment variables for the application
• bootstrap.php: Loads the Container, Routes, Middleware and Settings.
• middleware.php: Contains middleware for the application.
• routes.php: Contains defined routes for the application.
• container.php: Houses the ContainerInterface utilizing PHP-DI for injection into the application.

FrontController

The front controller is just the index.php file and entry point to the application. This handles all requests through the application by channeling requests through a single handler object.

Container

Traditionally the style of fetching dependencies was to inject the whole container into your class which is considered an anti-pattern. We switch up the method in this application by using modern tools like PHP-DI.

The DI used in this application is housed in a Depedency Injection Container ( DIC ). The method we use in this application is composition over inheritance and (constructor) DI.

Domain

The domain in this application houses the complex business logic. Instead of putting together business logic into massive fat "Models", they are separated into specialized Services aka and Application Service

Each service can have multiple clients, e.g Action (request), CLI (console), Data (logic), Unit Testing (phpunit). This way each service manages only one responsibility and note more by separating data from behavior.

Eloquent

In this application example i'm using the Eloquent ORM, which is a minor package from Laravel. Eloquent simply allows us to create queries in a simplified manner. As well as determining user models that match table schema's. This is just a personal preference caused by a hatred of writing long SQL queries.

Deployment

Deployment is best served through a build pipeline however if manual deployment is necessary it's as simple as running:

composer install --no-dev --optimize-autoload

This will remove dev-dependencies as well as optimize the composer autoloader for better performance.

For security reasons it's also best practice to turn of output of error details:

$settings['error_handler_middleware'] = [
    'display_error_details' => false,
];

Big thanks to Daniel Optiz for his incredible write-ups on Slim and best practices.