README

My skeleton for PHP+Silex applications. Small, flat, predictable, minimal, flexible. Based very much on fabpot’s silex skeleton.

From zero to hello-world:

> curl -Ss https://getcomposer.org/installer | php
> ./composer.phar create-project barnabywalters/silex-starter
> ./serve
> ./open

What next?

• Replace namespace placeholders with the namespace for your project with this quick zsh+perl script: perl -p -i -e 's/YOUR_NAMESPACE_HERE/Your\\Actual\\Namespace/g' **/*.php
• Put application setup in src/app.php and config/
• Put new controllers in src/controllers.php, splitting them off into separate, sensible files when there are too many
• Put new templates in templates/
• Put new tests in test/ApplicationTest.php
• Put javascript in web/js/app.js
• Put new console commands in src/console.php

If I want to implement logging in really quickly I usually install taproot/authentication — the lowest-friction route to allowing login with your domain name.

Back-end

A basic Silex app is created with a URL generation provider and a basic pure-PHP template rendering provider which can be used like this:

<?php

$app['render']('template.html', [
    'templateContextVariable' => 'Hello!'
], $pad);

The first argument is the template path, relative to templates/, sans the .php. $pad is true by default, and wraps the content of the template with rendered output of templates/header.html.php and templates/footer.html.php.

All application-specific code goes in src/. Functions (which should make up the mainstay of your code) go in flat, sensibly named files in this directory — add their paths to composer.json to autoload them. src/ is also the root for any PSR-0 class-based autoloading you may wish to do.

hacks.php is provided as a location for temporary, cludgy code. It is an invitation to both be explicit about the fact that something is cludgy, and an invitation to fix it. A good place to look in those times when you have 30 minutes and want to fix something small.

Front-end

A minimal RequireJS “application” is provided, with bean for cross-browser event handling and my own http.js, a minimal abstraction over XMLHttpRequest.

Command Line

Various conveniences are provided.

• ./serve starts the built-in PHP webserver. Alter this file to use the port of your choice.
• ./open opens the above in your default browser. Ditto.
• ./console is the entry-point for running tasks defined in src/console.php. By default there is one:
• ./console shell starts a PHP interpreter with $app available for quick scripting

To define new console commands, add them to src/console.php.

Testing

PHPUnit is used for testing. The stub of a functional test suite is provided, with a bootstrapping function for creating an application object tailor-made for testing.

To run the tests, do the usual:

> ./vendor/bin/phpunit

You may also wish to create an alias or shortcut for this if it becomes too unwieldy and you aren’t using an automatic test runner.