Description
Restler is a simple and effective multi-format Web API Server written in PHP.
Just deal with your business logic in php, restler will take care of the REST!
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README
[Restler](public/examples/resources/Restler.png) Luracast Restler
Version 3.0 Release Candidate 5
Restler is a simple and effective multi-format Web API Server written in PHP.
Just deal with your business logic in php, restler will take care of the REST!
if you do not have PHP >= 5.3.2 on your server and wont be able to upgrade you may use Restler 2 instead
Restler 3 - Better APIs by Design
- Developer Home
- Live Examples
- Updates on Facebook and Twitter
- Features
- Installation
- Quick Start Guide
- Change Log
Features
- No Learning Curve
- Light weight
- Flexible
- Highly Customizable
- Many Examples that can be tried on your localhost to get started
- Supports HTTP request methods HEAD, GET, POST, PUT, DELETE, OPTIONS and PATCH via header or request parameter (method)
- Supports both RESTful and Pragmatic REST API Design
- Clients can use X-HTTP-Method-Override header, supports Cross Origin Resource Sharing and JSONP
- Two way format(media type) conversion both send and receive
- Pluggable content Formatter framework and api
- Comes with JSON, XML, Yaml, Amf, and Plist(both XML and Binary) format support
- Pluggable Authentication schemes
- OAuth 2 Server
- Pluggable Filters to effectively manage API usage
- API Rate Limiting Filter
- Routing
- Manual Routing (Annotation)
- Using
@url GET my/custom/url/{param}
PHPDoc comments
- Using
- Auto Routing (Reflection)
- URL to Method mapping
- URL part to Method parameter mapping
- Query parameters to Method parameter mapping
- Request body to Method parameter mapping
[planned]
Header to Method parameter mapping
- Manual Routing (Annotation)
- Cache built-in
- Client Side Caching support
- Proxy Caching support
- Server Side Caching
[planned]
ETag, If-None-Match support[planned]
Last-Modified, If-Modified-Since support
- API Features
- Always supports URLEncoded format for simplified input (POST vars)
- Automatic parameter validation and type conversion
- API versioning support by URL and/or vendor specific MIME
- API documentation and discovery using Restler API Explorer
- Throttling and Performance tuning
- Management
[planned]
Unit Testing using PHPUnit- Behavior Driven API testing using Behat and Guzzle
- Command line Project Management using Respect/Foundation
- Dependency Management using Composer
- Source code distributed under LGPL
Git Repository and the Branches
Most stable and recent version is maintained at the
master
branch, previous versions are kept in the branches such asv1
andv2
Version branch with the current version such as
v3
is used for building up the next release. It's documentation may not be updated frequently and thus reserved for the daring ones.Feature branches such as
features/html
andfeatures/router
are purely for experimentation purpose to try out a feature
Installation
Make sure PHP 5.3.2 or above (at least 5.3.4 recommended to avoid potential bugs) is available on your server
1. Install Composer
Restler uses Composer to manage its dependencies.
First, download a copy of composer.phar
. It can be kept in your project folder
or ideally in usr/local/bin
to use it globally for all your projects. If you
are on Windows, you can use the composer
windows installer instead.
2. Install Restler
Option 1. Using composer create-project
You may install Restler by running the create project command in your terminal. Replace {projectName} with your actual project name. It will create a folder with that name and install Restler.
php composer.phar create-project luracast/restler {projectName}
Note:-
If you do not want the additional formats and BDD tools you can include
--no-dev
to enforce exclusion of dev packages.If you want to try the bleading edge v3 branch or any of the feature branches include
3.x-dev
ordev-features/html
in the above command
Option 2. Downloading from github
Once Composer is installed, download the latest version of the Restler
framework and extract its contents into a directory on your server. Next, in the
root of your Restler project, run the php composer.phar install
(or composer install
) command to install all of the framework's dependencies.
This process requires Git to be installed on the server to successfully complete
the installation.
If you want to update the Restler framework, you may issue the
php composer.phar update
command.
Note:- If are not allowed to install composer and git on your server, you can install and run them on your development machine. The resulting files and folders can be uploaded and used on the server.
3. Configure
Ideally public folder should be mapped as your web root, It is optional, but recommended to avoid exposing unneeded files and folders.
4. Try it out
Try the live examples in your localhost
5. Run some test
Update the base_url specified in behat.yml
and then try the following command
bin/behat
This will test the examples against the behaviors expected, for example
Feature: Testing CRUD Example
Scenario: Creating new Author with JSON
Given that I want to make a new "Author"
And his "name" is "Chris"
And his "email" is "[email protected]"
And the request is sent as JSON
When I request "/examples/_007_crud/authors"
Then the response status code should be 200
And the response should be JSON
And the response has a "id" property
All set, Happy Restling! :)
Quick Start Guide
Once you have got restler installed with the above steps, you can quickly create your application by following these steps
1. Write API
Create your API classes with all needed public and protected methods
2. Open the Gateway
Create the gateway (index.php) as follows
<?php
require_once '../../../vendor/restler.php';
use Luracast\Restler\Restler;
$r = new Restler();
$r->addAPIClass('YourApiClassNameHere'); // repeat for more
$r->handle(); //serve the response
3. Prettify URLs
Enable URL Rewriting
Make sure all the requests are routed to index.php by enabling URL Rewriting for your website
For example:-
If you are on Apache, you can use an .htaccess file such as
DirectoryIndex index.php
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^$ index.php [QSA,L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index.php [QSA,L]
</IfModule>
<IfModule mod_php5.c>
php_flag display_errors On
</IfModule>
Note:- This requires
AllowOverride
to be set toAll
instead ofNone
in thehttpd.conf
file, and might require some tweaking on some server configurations. Refer to mod_rewrite documentation for more info.
If you are on Nginx, you have to make sure you set the server_name
and pass the
PHP scripts to fast cgi (PHP-FPM) listening on 127.0.0.1:9000
server {
listen 80;
server_name api.luracast.com; //change it to match your server name
//... other stuff
location ~ \.php$ {
root /var/www/html;
fastcgi_pass 127.0.0.1:9000;
fastcgi_index index.php;
fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME /var/www/html/$fastcgi_script_name;
include fastcgi_params;
}
//... other stuff
}
Note:- This requires PHP, PHP-FPM to be properly installed and configured. Refer to PHP FastCGI example for more info.
4. Customise
Fine tune to suit your needs
<?php
require_once '../../../vendor/restler.php';
use Luracast\Restler\Restler;
use Luracast\Restler\Defaults;
//set the defaults to match your requirements
Defaults::$throttle = 20; //time in milliseconds for bandwidth throttling
//setup restler
$r = new Restler();
$r->addAPIClass('YourApiClassNameHere'); // repeat for more
$r->addAPIClass('Resources'); //from restler framework for API Explorer
$r->addFilterClass('RateLimit'); //Add Filters as needed
$r->handle(); //serve the response
If you have successfully completed Installation Step 2, you should have
Restler API Explorer installed
in vendor/Luracast/explorer
folder. Create a symbolic link of
vendor/Luracast/explorer/dist
or copy the folder and name it as explorer
Place the explorer in the same folder as the index.php
Explore the api and try it out by openings explorer/index.html
from the web
root on your browser
Happy Exploring! :)
Note:- Using eAccelerator can make restler to fail as it removes the comments. More info can be found here
5. Annotate
Restler supports annotations in the form of PHPDoc comments for API fine tuning
They are documented in detail under [Annotations](ANNOTATIONS.md)
6. Authorize
In order to protect your api, authenticate and allow valid users
<?php
require_once '../../../vendor/restler.php';
use Luracast\Restler\Restler;
$r = new Restler();
$r->addAPIClass('YourApiClassNameHere'); // repeat for more
$r->addAuthenticationClass('CustomAuth'); //Add Authentication classes as needed
$r->handle(); //serve the response
7. Start Production
By default Restler runs in debug mode more fine tuned for API developer, by showing detailed error messages and prettifying the api result to human readbale form
By turning on production mode you will gain some performance boost as it will cache the routes (comment parsing happens only once instead of every api call), few other files and avoid giving out debug information
<?php
require_once '../../../vendor/restler.php';
use Luracast\Restler\Restler;
//setup restler
$r = new Restler(true); //turn on production mode by passing true.
//If you are using file based cache (the default) make sure cache folder is
//writable. when you make changes to your code make sure you delete the
// routes.php inside the cache folder
//...
Change Log
Restler 3.0 RC5
- Scope (an dependency injection container) is added. It's register method allows adding api classes that has some dependencies.
- Improves HtmlFormat to support blade templates and makes it easily extendable to add your own templates.
- HtmlFormat::$format has been renamed as HtmlFormat::$template for better clarrity
- HtmlFormat now supports auto templating to load relevant template for an API method based on the mapped url.
- Tag, a utility class for generating html tags in object oriented way.
- Emmet class that extends a subset of emmet to create a a template engine.
- Forms class to auto generate forms for any API method prebuilt in HTML5, Twitter Bootstrap 3, Zurb Foundation formats.
- Validator improved to allow suppressing validation errors from throwing exceptions immediatly, so that API call can reach the API method
- Validator improved to be form validation friendly.
- Nav class creating html navigation interface.
- OAuth examles updgrated to use version 1.0 of OAuth2 library.
- Many bug fixes and improvements.
Restler 3.0 RC4
$reques_data
in api method parameters andgetRequestData()
on restler instance now excludes$_GET
parameters.- Returning null from api method now excludes the response body. This behaviour
can be changed by setting
Defaults::$emptyBodyForNullResponse
to false. - Added many api examples under tests folder for testing feature by feature using BDD
- Support for custom class parameters and array of custom class parameters
- Ability to pass the parameter directly as the body of the request when it is the only parameter
- Fixes to composer.json and publish stable release as composer package on packagist.
- New Routes class with improved routing, including wild card routes and smart routing based on paramter type.
- Possibility to use any autoloader including composer's autoloader for maximum interoperability
- Moved to using the rodneyrehm/plist package for CFPropertyList.
- Removed required packages as they are not technically "required" per se, Restler works out of the box.
- Created supported packages as require-dev instead which will be installed via
composer install --dev
- Added suggested section for all the supported packages.
- Added keywords to package descriptor
- Added branch alias to indicate that v3 is the snapshot for v3.0.x-dev
- Released Restler as package on packagist.
Restler 3.0 RC3
- Added Defaults::$cacheDirectory to set cache directory in one central place
- Added JSONP support with JsFormat class by extending JsonFormat.
- Fixes fatal error when the JSON sent in the request body is not an object or array
- Improves inline comment parsing by array conversion when delimiter is found and tag is not @pattern
- RateLimit class re-written to support all range of time units second|minute|hour|day|week|month to have fine grained control
- Resources class improved to include description for body parameters
- Fixes Resources not to include namespace when the return type is array of custom class
- Fixed Resource not to include the API of another class when the current api name is a begins with part of the other API
- Added two more ways to exclude API's from explorer/documentation
Resources::$excludedHttpMethods
(array)Resources::$excludedPaths
(array)
- Fixes unescaped unicode bug in PHP < 5.4
- Fixes a bug with ValidationInfo parsing @choice inline comment
- Added Charset support
- Added Language (basic) support
- Updated the BDD tests to include new features
- Fixes a bug in Restler class which affects $_GET overriding
Defaults
- Fixes a bug in XmlFormat parsing XML content to array
- Added support for JSONP via jsFormat extension of JsonFormat
- Fixes a bug in unicode un-escaping for JsonFormat in PHP < 5.4
- Fixes the order so that responseFormat->setCharset is called before encoding the response
- Documentation improvements and minor bug fixes
Restler 3.0 RC2
- Filter classes can use authentication status and respond differently for authenticated users by implementing iUseAuthentication interface
RateLimit
class added to rate limit the api usage- Fixed a bug with setCompatibilityMode
- Resources updated to use only paths for resource identification instead of
class name
- Enabled Access Control for Documentation
- Fixed CommentParser to ignore repeated white space so that it parses comments correctly
- Fixed comment parsing for @status and @expires tags
- Added the following Examples
- Documentation
- Rate Limit
- Access Control
- CRUD example updated to include PATCH support
Restler 3.0
Restler 3.0 is completely rewritten from Restler 2.0 with best practices in mind for
- PHP Coding
- RESTfulness and/or Pragmatic REST
- API Design
Restler 3.0
- uses namespaces, Late Static Bindings, and Closures and thus it is PHP 5.3+ only (if you need PHP 5.0+ support use Restler 2)
- provides backward compatibility for Restler 1 and 2.
Use
$r->setCompatibilityMode($version);
- supports hybrid api which provides extended data to authenticated users
Use
@access hybrid
PHPDoc comment - uses smart auto routing by default where API method parameters that have default values are no longer mapped to the URL, instead they are mapped to query strings to reduce ambiguity in the url.
- supports
suppress_response_codes
as query string, when set to true; all http responses will be returned with HTTP OK with the errors in the body to accommodate mobile and less privileged clients. - has improved
CommentParser
which adds support for embedded data in multiple formats- inline doc comments
{@name value}
- query string params ``` param1=value¶m2=value2```
- json ``` {"param1": value, "param2": value2}``` which can be placed in multi-lines
- inline doc comments
- has
Defaults
class with static properties that can be changed to suit the needs - iAuthenticate is now using
__isAllowed
method instead of__isAuthenticated
so that same class can be used for Authentication or Filtering - iUseAuthentication interface added to help hybrid access api methods and filters to find out about user authentication status
- iFilter interface updated to provide charset support
- ...(more to follow)
Restler 2.0
Restler 2.0 is a major rewrite to use convention over configuration and it is optimized for performance. Here are some of the major changes and improvements
- PHPDoc comments to map a method to URI are now optional.
- All public methods that does not begin with an underscore are mapped
automatically to the method name (
gateway\classname\methodname\param1\...
) - If we do not specify the second parameter for
$restler->addAPIClass
it will be mapped to the class name instead of mapping it to the root - Restler 2 is written for PHP 5.3 and above but it make use of compat.php and work on any version of PHP starting from PHP 5.0
*Note that all licence references and agreements mentioned in the Restler README section above
are relevant to that project's source code only.