January 24, 2018January 24, 2018 by Kévin Dunglas

API Platform 2.2: GraphQL, JSON API, React admin and PWA, Kubernetes instant deployment and many more new features

API Platform, English, JavaScript & HTML5, PHP, Programmation, Symfony
API Platform, Docker, GraphQL, Javascript, JSON API, Kubernetes, PHP, Symfony
2 Comments

I’m glad to announce the immediate availability of API Platform 2.2 beta 1. This is a huge release that comes with a lot of exciting features including (but not limited too):

GraphQL and JSON API support
Symfony 4 / Flex integration
API Platform Admin integration (built with ReactJS and Admin On Rest)
ReactJS and Vue.js Progressive Web App generators integration (a React Native app generator is also available)
Revamped Docker containers for both PHP and JavaScript components, including out of the box support for HTTP2, HTTPS and a built-in invalidation-based cache mechanism using Varnish
The ability to deploy in seconds in any Kubernetes cluster
A new, super-easy, way to register filters through annotations
And literally dozens of developer experience, performance and quality improvements

V2.2 will definitely be the best version of API Platform, and is probably the most advanced “full-stack” solution to create API-driven projects. The paradigm shift introduced by this new version has been detailed in my talk during the SymfonyCon 2017.

It took 6 months and 483 commits from more than 60 contributors to craft this version. The documentation has also been dramatically improved, even if some work is still to do (upgrading the getting started guide and migrating all articles to the new Flex directory structure, finish to document some new features).

Thank you very much to all contributors of the project! You rock!

Let’s see more in depth all of these new features:

The New Distribution

The easiest way to get started with API Platform has always been to use the provided Docker setup. In version 2.2, the Docker configuration has been totally redesigned to fit with the new features provided by Symfony Flex and to integrate our JavaScript components.

To get started:

Download the last release
Decompress the archive and open a terminal in the resulting directory
Run docker-compose up

You get:

– An API skeleton following the Flex directory structure. Just add classes representing your public data model (see the example below) to get a working hypermedia and/or GraphQL web API.

The API is available in HTTP/2 and HTTPS thanks to the provided development proxy. It also automatically benefits from the API Platform’s built-in cache mechanism (the Varnish container is also provided). CORS headers are automatically configured. As you can see, the nice documentation is – of course – still available if you open the entrypoint in a browser.

– A ReactJS Progressive Web App skeleton with a fancy welcome page designed by Laury Sorriaux:

Execute docker-compose exec client generate-api-platform-client to bootstrap a nice and fully-featured Progressive Web App (that can even work offline) using React, Redux and Bootstrap 4 and respecting accessibility recommendations.

To generate the PWA, the tool parses the API hypermedia description automatically generated in the Hydra format by the API component. This generator can work with any server exposing a Hydra documentation (done with API Platform or not).

The tool also has Vue.js, React Native and TypeScript skeletons thanks to the great contributions of Alain Hippolyte, Piotr Synowiec and Antoine Bluchet.

Read the full documentation of the API Platform Client Generator.

– Last but not least, a dynamically generated admin for the API is also automatically available:

Like the client generator, the API Platform Admin component also leverages the Hydra documentation to automatically guess the structure of the data exposed by the API.

Because it is built on top of React and Admin On Rest (aka React Admin), the UI is fully customizable.

Morgan Auchedé is the new maintainer of this component, and has greatly improved it since its initial release.

– In this version of API Platform, the MySQL container has been replaced by a Postgres one.

Instant Kubernetes Deployment

Kubernetes has become the most popular way to deploy, run and manage containers in production. Both Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services provide managed Kubernetes environment.

API Platform 2.2 contains a built-in Helm (the k8s package manager) chart to deploy with ease:

helm upgrade --install ./api/helm/api \
    --set php.repository=gcr.io/test-api-platform/php \
    --set nginx.repository=gcr.io/test-api-platform/nginx \
    --set secret=MyAppSecretKey \
    --set postgresql.postgresPassword=MyPgPassword \
    --set postgresql.persistence.enabled=true \
    --set corsAllowUrl='^https?://[a-z\]*\.mywebsite.com$'

helm upgrade --install ./api/helm/api \

--set php.repository=gcr.io/test-api-platform/php \

--set nginx.repository=gcr.io/test-api-platform/nginx \

--set secret=MyAppSecretKey \

--set postgresql.postgresPassword=MyPgPassword \

--set postgresql.persistence.enabled=true \

--set corsAllowUrl='^https?://[a-z\]*\.mywebsite.com$'

Your app is now up and running in a managed cluster! Read the related documentation to learn more about the Kubernetes support.

GraphQL Support

GraphQL is a query language for APIs designed by Facebook that is becoming a very popular alternative to the REST pattern. GraphQL support has been the most wanted feature for a while, it is now fully implemented!

The new GraphQL subsystem of API Platform now supports:

100% of the main specification, including queries (read) and mutations (write)
100% of the GraphQL Relay Server Specification (= compatibility with both Relay and Apollo clients)
Pagination
Filters (built-in and custom ones, see below)
Validation
Access control rules
Generation of optimized SQL queries (automatic joins depending of requested data)
The GraphiQL UI

To enable the GraphQL support, you just have to install the GraphQL PHP library:

docker-compose exec php composer req webonyx/graphql-php

1	docker-compose exec php composer req webonyx/graphql-php

Then, create an API Platform entity, as usual:

<?php

namespace App\Entity;

use ApiPlatform\Core\Annotation\ApiResource;
use Doctrine\ORM\Mapping as ORM;
use Symfony\Component\Validator\Constraints as Assert;

/**
 * An organization.
 *
 * @ApiResource
 * @ORM\Entity
 */
class Organization
{
    /**
     * @ORM\Id
     * @ORM\Column(type="guid")
     * @Assert\NotBlank
     */
    public $id;

    /**
     * @ORM\Column(type="text")
     * @Assert\NotBlank
     */
    public $name;
}

<?php

namespace App\Entity;

use ApiPlatform\Core\Annotation\ApiResource;

use Doctrine\ORM\Mapping as ORM;

use Symfony\Component\Validator\Constraints as Assert;

/**

* An organization.

* @ApiResource

* @ORM\Entity

class Organization

{

/**

* @ORM\Id

* @ORM\Column(type="guid")

* @Assert\NotBlank

public $id;

/**

* @ORM\Column(type="text")

* @Assert\NotBlank

public $name;

}

Yes, both GraphQL and REST formats can be used for the same entity! Thanks to API Platform’s hypermedia support, you can even run a GraphQL request, then apply REST operations to the retrieved resources using their IRIs! The best of both worlds.

Your GraphQL API is ready! Browse https://localhost:8443/graphql :

There is a lot to say about the GraphQL support, how to use it in collaboration with REST and how to apply fine-grained configurations. I’ll write a follow-up post dedicated to it, stay tuned!

The GraphQL support is an important team work of Raoul Clais, Alan Poulain, Baptiste Meyer and myself.

JSON API Support

JSON API is a rising, well designed, hypermedia format. Unlike JSON-LD (the default format exposed by API Platform), it’s not a web standard; and it has less features but it is also simpler to learn and understand.

With API Platform 2.2, you don’t have to choose, you can have both! And even more because API Platform supports out of the box JSON-LD/Hydra, HAL, JSON API, YAML, XML, raw JSON and as we’ve seen just before, GraphQL.

To enable JSON API, add the following config:

# config/packages/api_platform.yaml
api_platform:
    # ...
    formats:
        # ...
        jsonapi: ['application/vnd.api+json']
    error_formats:
        # ...
        jsonapi: ['application/vnd.api+json']

# config/packages/api_platform.yaml

api_platform:

# ...

formats:

# ...

jsonapi: ['application/vnd.api+json']

error_formats:

# ...

jsonapi: ['application/vnd.api+json']

Easy enough?

The JSON API support has been contributed by Hamza Amrouche, Hector Hurtarte and Baptiste Meyer.

Declaring API Filters Using Annotations

The API Platform filtering system is very powerful. It contains a lot of built-in filters and can easily be extended. However, until now, it wasn’t really easy to configure: it was requiring to declare services manually.

Because Symfony Flex is all about service autowiring and autoconfiguration, simplifying the filters configuration was a top priority task.

Hopefully, Antoine Bluchet created a nice way to do it using annotations:

<?php
// api/src/Entity/Organization.php

namespace App\Entity;

use ApiPlatform\Core\Annotation\ApiFilter;
use ApiPlatform\Core\Bridge\Doctrine\Orm\Filter\SearchFilter;

/**
 * ...
 */
class Organization
{
    // ...

    /**
     * @ApiFilter(SearchFilter::class)
     * ...
     */
    public $name;
}

<?php

// api/src/Entity/Organization.php

namespace App\Entity;

use ApiPlatform\Core\Annotation\ApiFilter;

use ApiPlatform\Core\Bridge\Doctrine\Orm\Filter\SearchFilter;

/**

* ...

class Organization

{

// ...

/**

* @ApiFilter(SearchFilter::class)

* ...

public $name;

}

Nothing more! You can now filter the collection of organizations by the name property, both with REST and GraphQL!

In addition to these main features, a lot of other configuration options and various improvements have been introduced. Read the full changelogs for more information:

Help Us: Test, Star, Spread the Word!

If you have some existing API Platform projects, or if you want to give a try to the framework, please test this new version and report any problem on our GitHub issue tracker!

If you like API Platform, please tell the world and give us a star on GitHub.

Since API Platform 2.2, the Symfony Thanks command is also shipped with API Platform. Thanks to this tool, you can send a star to all the PHP libraries you use in your project (including API Platform) by simply running: docker-compose exec php composer thanks

If you want to learn API Platform, come to one of the workshops organized during these upcoming tech conferences:

Don’t miss the next opportunities to learn @ApiPlatform during a 1 day workshop:
– « Creating and deploying API Platform apps on @platformsh » / @APIdaysGlobal
– « Mastering the API Platform’s server component » / @symfony_live Paris (2 sessions) then Phantasialand

— Kévin Dunglas (@dunglas) January 23, 2018

January 17, 2018January 17, 2018 by Kévin Dunglas

HTTP/2, PHP and Symfony: a brief history of the protocol powering the web, and how to use it

Here are the slides I presented yesterday during the Paris Symfony Meetup.

On the menu: a brief history of HTTP, how to use it with PHP (server and client-side) and how to push with Symfony 4.

Learn more about Symfony’s HTTP/2 support in my in-depth presentation of the WebLink Component.

November 17, 2017November 17, 2017 by Kévin Dunglas

[SymfonyCon] API Platform and Symfony: a Framework for API-driven Projects

API Platform, English, JavaScript & HTML5, PHP, Programmation, Symfony
API, API Platform, Docker, GraphQL, Kubernetes, React, REST, Symfony, SymfonyCon
1 Comment

Here are the slides of my talk during the Symfony Con Cluj. You can rate this talk on joind.in.

API Platform and Symfony: a Framework for API-driven Projects from Les-Tilleuls.coop

Install API Platform. Design the API data model as a set of tiny plain old PHP classes. Instantly get:

Fully featured dev environment with Symfony Flex and React containers, HTTP/2 and HTTPS support and a cache proxy
Pagination, data validation, access control, relation embedding, filters and error handling
Support for modern REST API formats: JSON-LD/Hydra, OpenAPI/Swagger, JSONAPI, HAL, JSON…
GraphQL support
An API responding in a just few milliseconds thanks to the builtin invalidation based cache mechanism
A dynamically created Material Design admini interface (a la Sonata / EasyAdmin – but 100% client-side) built with React.
Client apps skeletons: React/Redux, React Native, Vue.js, Angular…
Finally, deploy in 1 command on Google Container Engine or any cloud with a Kubernetes instance with the provided Helm chart.

Yes, you just need is describing a data model, just a few line of codes to get all of that!

November 3, 2017November 3, 2017 by Kévin Dunglas

API Platform Admin 0.2: an admin in 1 minute for your API (React Progressive Web App)

API Platform, English, JavaScript & HTML5, PHP, Symfony
admin, Admin On Rest, API, GraphQL, HATEOAS, Hydra, hypermedia, Javascript, Material Design, React
1 Comment

The version 0.2 of the API Platform‘s admin component has just been released!

This nice tool allows to automatically and dynamically build a fully featured administration interface (CRUD, pagination, relations…) for any API supporting the Hydra hypermedia vocabulary (more formats supported soon, see at the end of this article). 0 line of code required!

API Platform Admin is built with React on top of the famous Admin On Rest library as a Progressive Web App.

Let’s discover the bunch of new features that this version brings.

Getting Started

Assuming that you have an API exposing a Hydra documentation, you just have to initialize the following React component to get your admin:

import React from 'react';
import { HydraAdmin } from '@api-platform/admin';

export default () => <HydraAdmin entrypoint="https://api.example.com"/>;

import React from 'react';

import { HydraAdmin } from '@api-platform/admin';

export default () => <HydraAdmin entrypoint="https://api.example.com"/>;

For instance, create a new app with Facebook’s create-react-app, replace the content of src/App.js with the previous snippet and run yarn add @api-platform/admin. You’re done!

If you get an error related to multiple versions of React being loaded, just remove the react and react-dom packages from your project’s package.json and run yarn install again.

If you don’t have a JSON-LD / Hydra API yet, here is the code of the one I’ll use in the following examples. This API has been created using the API Platform’s distribution:

<?php

namespace App\Entity;

use ApiPlatform\Core\Annotation\ApiProperty;
use ApiPlatform\Core\Annotation\ApiResource;
use Doctrine\Common\Collections\ArrayCollection;
use Doctrine\ORM\Mapping as ORM;

/**
 * @ORM\Entity
 * @ApiResource
 */
class Person
{
    /**
     * @ORM\Id
     * @ORM\GeneratedValue
     * @ORM\Column(type="integer")
     */
    private $id;

    /**
     * @ORM\Column
     * @ApiProperty(iri="http://schema.org/name")
     */
    public $name;

    /**
     * @var Greeting[]
     *
     * @ORM\OneToMany(targetEntity="Greeting", mappedBy="person", cascade={"persist"})
     */
    public $greetings;

    public function __construct()
    {
        $this->greetings = new ArrayCollection();
    }

    public function getId()
    {
        return $this->id;
    }

    public function addGreeting(Greeting $greeting)
    {
        $greeting->person = $this;
        $this->greetings->add($greeting);
    }

    public function removeGreeting(Greeting $greeting)
    {
        $greeting->person = null;
        $this->greetings->removeElement($greeting);
    }
}

<?php

namespace App\Entity;

use ApiPlatform\Core\Annotation\ApiProperty;

use ApiPlatform\Core\Annotation\ApiResource;

use Doctrine\Common\Collections\ArrayCollection;

use Doctrine\ORM\Mapping as ORM;

/**

* @ORM\Entity

* @ApiResource

class Person

{

/**

* @ORM\Id

* @ORM\GeneratedValue

* @ORM\Column(type="integer")

private $id;

/**

* @ORM\Column

* @ApiProperty(iri="http://schema.org/name")

public $name;

/**

* @var Greeting[]

* @ORM\OneToMany(targetEntity="Greeting", mappedBy="person", cascade={"persist"})

public $greetings;

public function __construct()

{

$this->greetings = new ArrayCollection();

}

public function getId()

{

return $this->id;

}

public function addGreeting(Greeting $greeting)

{

$greeting->person = $this;

$this->greetings->add($greeting);

}

public function removeGreeting(Greeting $greeting)

{

$greeting->person = null;

$this->greetings->removeElement($greeting);

}

<?php

namespace App\Entity;

use ApiPlatform\Core\Annotation\ApiProperty;
use ApiPlatform\Core\Annotation\ApiResource;
use Doctrine\ORM\Mapping as ORM;
use Symfony\Component\Validator\Constraints as Assert;

/**
 * @ApiResource
 * @ORM\Entity
 */
class Greeting
{
    /**
     * @ORM\Id
     * @ORM\GeneratedValue
     * @ORM\Column(type="integer")
     */
    private $id;

    /**
     * @ORM\Column
     * @Assert\NotBlank
     * @ApiProperty(iri="http://schema.org/name")
     */
    public $name = '';

    /**
     * @ORM\ManyToOne(targetEntity="Person", inversedBy="greetings")
     */
    public $person;

    public function getId(): ?int
    {
        return $this->id;
    }
}

<?php

namespace App\Entity;

use ApiPlatform\Core\Annotation\ApiProperty;

use ApiPlatform\Core\Annotation\ApiResource;

use Doctrine\ORM\Mapping as ORM;

use Symfony\Component\Validator\Constraints as Assert;

/**

* @ApiResource

* @ORM\Entity

class Greeting

{

/**

* @ORM\Id

* @ORM\GeneratedValue

* @ORM\Column(type="integer")

private $id;

/**

* @ORM\Column

* @Assert\NotBlank

* @ApiProperty(iri="http://schema.org/name")

public $name = '';

/**

* @ORM\ManyToOne(targetEntity="Person", inversedBy="greetings")

public $person;

public function getId(): ?int

{

return $this->id;

}

Yes, you just need those two tiny PHP classes to get a hypermedia API. Learn more about the API component by reading the getting started guide. But, really, any API with a Hydra documentation will do the job regardless of the server-side programming language.

Native Support for to-Many Relations

API Platform Admin supports to-one relations since its very first release. However it was mandatory to customize the component used for to-many relations. This isn’t the case anymore. Our API documentation parser gained support for cardinalities and can now extract them if the API documentation includes OWL’s maxCardinality properties.

If no cardinality is provided, the admin will use a to-many widget by default.

Thanks to this new feature, here is how the edition screen of the Person resource looks like this:

The admin is able to guess that the Person resource is related to many Greeting ones and use the appropriate Admin On Rest component.

Detection of More Schema.org’s Types (name, url and email)

API Platform Admin is able to guess the widget to use depending of the type of a resource’s property. It supports:

Numbers (http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#float and http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#integer ranges)
Dates (http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#date and http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#dateTime ranges)
Booleans (http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#boolean range)
And of course text fields

In this new release, Admin also supports some types of the popular Schema.org vocabulary:

As shown in the previous screenshots (e.g. Greetings select box), if a property has the type http://schema.org/name, this property will be used instead of the ID when displaying this relation
If a property has the type http://schema.org/url, the URL will be clickable when displayed in the admin
If a property has the type http://schema.org/email, the HTML input will be of type email and a basic validation will occur (this was already working in v0.1)

Support for Read-only Resources

The version 0.1 wasn’t able to deal with read-only resource (no POST nor PUT operation). We have improved the API doc parser to support owl:equivalentClass properties. Now, if the API documentation provide those properties, the admin will be builded even if the resource is read-only (of course in this case you will only be able to browse resources, and not to edit them).

Easier and Deeper Customization

Morgan Auchedé did an excellent work to make the Admin fully and easily customizable. You can now override any generated React component by a custom one, or one from Admin On Rest, or from MUI React. You can just replace (or ad, or remove) a specific input or field. But you can also replace a whole list, a show view, a creation or edition form or a remove button.

Here is an example of full customization, courtesy of Morgan:

import parseHydraDocumentation from '@api-platform/api-doc-parser/lib/hydra/parseHydraDocumentation';
import { Datagrid, EditButton, ImageField, List, ShowButton, TextField } from 'admin-on-rest';
import React from 'react';
import SingleImageInput from '../components/inputs/single-image-input';

export default entrypoint => parseHydraDocumentation(entrypoint)
    .then(
        ({ api }) => {
            // Customize "Gallery" resource
            const gallery = api.resources.find(({ name }) => 'galleries' === name);
            gallery.list = (props) => (
                <List {...props}>
                    <Datagrid>
                        <TextField source="id"/>
                        {props.options.fieldFactory(props.options.resource.fields.find(({ name }) => name === 'name'))}
                        {props.options.fieldFactory(props.options.resource.fields.find(({ name }) => name === 'mainImage'))}
                        {props.hasShow && <ShowButton />}
                        {props.hasEdit && <EditButton />}
                    </Datagrid>
                </List>
            );

            // Customize "images" field
            const images = gallery.fields.find(({ name }) => 'images' === name);
            images.field = props => (
                <ImageField {...props} src="contentUrl"/>
            );
            images.input = props => (
                <SingleImageInput {...props} accept="image/*" multiple={true}>
                    <ImageField source="contentUrl"/>
                </SingleImageInput>
            );
            images.input.defaultProps = {
                addField: true,
                addLabel: true,
            };

            // Customize "mainImage" field
            const mainImage = gallery.fields.find(({ name }) => 'mainImage' === name);
            mainImage.field = props => (
                <ImageField {...props} source={`${props.source}.contentUrl`}/>
            );
            mainImage.input = props => (
                <SingleImageInput {...props} accept="image/*" multiple={false}>
                    <ImageField source="contentUrl"/>
                </SingleImageInput>
            );
            mainImage.input.defaultProps = {
                addField: true,
                addLabel: true,
            };
            mainImage.input.defaultProps = {
                addField: true,
                addLabel: true,
            };

            return { api };
        },
    );

import parseHydraDocumentation from '@api-platform/api-doc-parser/lib/hydra/parseHydraDocumentation';

import { Datagrid, EditButton, ImageField, List, ShowButton, TextField } from 'admin-on-rest';

import React from 'react';

import SingleImageInput from '../components/inputs/single-image-input';

export default entrypoint => parseHydraDocumentation(entrypoint)

.then(

({ api }) => {

// Customize "Gallery" resource

const gallery = api.resources.find(({ name }) => 'galleries' === name);

gallery.list = (props) => (

{props.options.fieldFactory(props.options.resource.fields.find(({ name }) => name === 'name'))}

{props.options.fieldFactory(props.options.resource.fields.find(({ name }) => name === 'mainImage'))}

{props.hasShow && <ShowButton />}

{props.hasEdit && <EditButton />}

</Datagrid>

</List>

);

// Customize "images" field

const images = gallery.fields.find(({ name }) => 'images' === name);

images.field = props => (

);

images.input = props => (

</SingleImageInput>

);

images.input.defaultProps = {

addField: true,

addLabel: true,

};

// Customize "mainImage" field

const mainImage = gallery.fields.find(({ name }) => 'mainImage' === name);

mainImage.field = props => (

);

mainImage.input = props => (

</SingleImageInput>

);

mainImage.input.defaultProps = {

addField: true,

addLabel: true,

};

mainImage.input.defaultProps = {

addField: true,

addLabel: true,

};

return { api };

);

Ability to Support Other Formats Such as GraphQL

The parser has been designed to be able to be parse other formats such as a GraphQL schema or Swagger/Open API. The api-doc-parser library provides an intermediate representation that is populated by the specific format parser. It’s this representation that is used by the parser as well as by our React and Vue.js Progressive Web App generator.

It means that when converters from other formats than Hydra to this intermediate representation will be available (Pull Requests welcome), both tools we’ll support those formats. As you may know, the server part of API Platform now supports GraphQL. You can guess which format we’ll implement next in the api-doc-parser!

#GraphQL support just landed in @ApiPlatform⚡️💫🎇! Create a class: done. https://t.co/2QaEzgAb9p Contributed by Raoul Clais and @_alanpoulain pic.twitter.com/asaA62UVTw

— Kévin Dunglas (@dunglas) October 6, 2017

October 26, 2017June 30, 2018 by Kévin Dunglas

Symfony 4 Run-through (Forum PHP 2017)

API Platform, English, PHP, Symfony
AFUP, Flex, Forum PHP, PHP, Symfony, Symfony 4
1 Comment

Symfony is a framework broadly recognized for its quality, reliability and ability to drive large enterprise projects. But for the last few years, Symfony has also gained many features to develop faster, and to refactor more easily. Symfony 4 offers major improvements in this area that will deeply change the way we build applications.

Let’s talk about:

Symfony 4 main concepts and new features: micro-framework by default, 12-factor app, new components …
Flex, the new and powerful Symfony installer that can also automatically install and configure libraries and bundles
Symfony 4’s new simplified (and “bundle-less”) directory structure
The autowiring (now enabled by default), which allows the automatic injection of dependencies without having to write any configuration (no more YAML and XML)
The revamped controllers mechanism
Webpack Encore, the first Symfony component ever written in JavaScript, designed to easily integrate JavaScript and CSS tools in a PHP project
The official integrations of the Doctrine (ORM), API Platform (API) and EasyAdmin libraries (admin generator)
How to easily use Symfony 4 with Docker from dev to cloud deployment with a dedicated skeleton

You’ll learn how to leverage Symfony for large projects, prototypes, small applications and even your “weekend projects”, and how to migrate from smallest to the largest.

Recordings:

October 20, 2017September 10, 2018 by Kévin Dunglas

Symfony 4: HTTP/2 Push and Preloading

English, PHP, Symfony
h2, HTTP/2, HTTPS, performance, PHP, Push, Server Push, Symfony, WebLink
5 Comments

A few months ago, I’ve contributed a new component to Symfony: WebLink. By implementing cutting edge web standards, namely HTTP/2 Server Push and W3C’s Resource Hints, it brings great opportunities to boost webapp’s performance.

Thanks to Symfony WebLink, HTTP/2 (h2) servers are able to push resources to clients before they even know that they need them (think to CSS or JavaScript files, or relations of an API resource). WebLink also enables other very efficient optimisations that work with HTTP 1:

telling the browser to fetch or to render another webpage in the background ;
init early DNS lookups, TCP handshakes or TLS negotiations

Let’s discover how easy it is to use it and the real life benefits you can expect. The WebLink components is available since Symfony 3.3 (it means you can start to use it today), but in this article I’ll use Symfony 4 to celebrate the release of its first beta yesterday!

To get started, download my Docker installer and runtime for Symfony 4/Flex. It includes everything you need to run Symfony (PHP 7.1 configured properly for Symfony, and Composer) and a development reverse proxy (Apache) supporting HTTP/2 Server Push and HTTPS (most clients only support HTTP/2 over TLS).

Unzip the downloaded archive, open a shell in the resulting directory and run the following commands:

# Optional: use Symfony 4 beta (will default to Symfony 3.3 if you omit this line)
$ docker-compose build --build-arg STABILITY=beta app
# Install Flex and start the project
$ docker-compose up

# Optional: use Symfony 4 beta (will default to Symfony 3.3 if you omit this line)

$ docker-compose build --build-arg STABILITY=beta app

# Install Flex and start the project

$ docker-compose up

Open https://localhost, if this nice page appears, you successfully created your first Symfony 4 project and are browsing it in HTTP/2!Let’s create a very simple homepage using the Twig templating engine. Because Symfony Flex starts as a micro framework, the first step is to install the library itself: docker-compose exec app composer req twig (run this in a new shell)

Flex is smart enough to download Twig, automatically register it into Symfony and enable Symfony features requiring the library. It also generates a base HTML5 layout in the templates/ directory (we will not use it but you should).

Now, download Bootstrap 4, extract the archive and copy the file dist/css/bootstrap.min.css in the public/ directory of our project. As you may know Symfony already has a nice integration with the upcoming version 4 of the most popular CSS framework.

Note: in a real project, you should use Yarn or NPM with Symfony Encore to install Bootstrap.

Now, it’s time to create the template of our homepage:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
    <meta charset="UTF-8">
    <title>Welcome!</title>
    <link rel="stylesheet" href="/bootstrap.min.css">
</head>
<body>
    <main role="main" class="container">
        <h1>Hello World</h1>
        <p class="lead">That's a lot of highly dynamic content, right?</p>
    </main>
</body>
</html>

<!DOCTYPE html>

<html>

<head>

<title>Welcome!</title>

</head>

<body>

<h1>Hello World</h1>

<p class="lead">That's a lot of highly dynamic content, right?</p>

</main>

</body>

</html>

And finally, register our new template as the homepage using the builtin TemplateController:

# config/routes.yaml
index:
    path: /
    defaults:
      _controller: 'Symfony\Bundle\FrameworkBundle\Controller\TemplateController::templateAction'
      template: 'homepage.html.twig'

# config/routes.yaml

index:

path: /

defaults:

_controller: 'Symfony\Bundle\FrameworkBundle\Controller\TemplateController::templateAction'

template: 'homepage.html.twig'

Clear the cache: docker-compose exec app bin/console c:c (this step will become optional when #24642 will be merged)

Refresh your browser, this nice HP should appear:

2 HTTP requests are issued by the browser, one for the homepage, and another one for Bootstrap.

But we know from the very beginning that the browser will need Bootstrap. Instead of waiting that the browser downloads the homepage, parses the HTML (notice “Initiator: Parser” in Chrome DevTools), encounters the reference to bootstrap.min.css and finally sends a new HTTP request, we could take benefit of the HTTP/2 Push feature to directly send both resources to the browser. Let’s do it!

Install the WebLink component: docker-compose exec app composer req weblink

As for Twig, Flex will automatically download and register this component into our app.

Now, update the template to use the preload Twig helper that leverages the WebLink component:

<!-- ... -->
    <link rel="stylesheet" href="{{ preload('/bootstrap.min.css') }}">
<!-- ... -->

Reload the page:As you can see (Initiator: Push), both responses have been sent directly by the server. bootstrap.min.css has started to be received before the browser even requested it!

How does it works?

The WebLink component tracks Link HTTP headers to add to the response. When using the preload() helper, a Link header with a preload rel attribute is added to the response:

According to the Preload specification, when a HTTP/2 server detects that the original (HTTP 1) response contains this HTTP header, it will automatically trigger a push for the related file in the same HTTP/2 connection.

The Apache server provided by my Docker setup supports this feature. It’s why Bootstrap is pushed to the client! Popular proxy services and CDN including Cloudflare, Fastly and Akamai also leverage this feature. It means that you can push resources to clients and improve performance of your apps in production right now! All you need is Symfony 3.3+ and a compatible web server (the free version of Nginx doesn’t support Server Push) or CDN service.

If you want to prevent the push but let the browser preload the resource by issuing an early separate HTTP request, use the nopush attribute:

<!-- ... -->
    <link rel="stylesheet" href="{{ preload('/bootstrap.min.css', {nopush: true}) }}">
<!-- ... -->

Before using HTTP/2 Push, be sure to read this great article about known issues, cache implications and the state of the support in popular browsers.

In addition to HTTP/2 Push and preloading, the WebLink component also provide some helpers to send Resource Hints to clients, the following helpers are available:

dns_prefetch: “indicate an origin that will be used to fetch required resources, and that the user agent should resolve as early as possible”
preconnect: “indicate an origin that will be used to fetch required resources. Initiating an early connection, which includes the DNS lookup, TCP handshake, and optional TLS negotiation, allows the user agent to mask the high latency costs of establishing a connection”
prefetch: “identify a resource that might be required by the next navigation, and that the user agent should fetch, such that the user agent can deliver a faster response once the resource is requested in the future”
prerender: “identify a resource that might be required by the next navigation, and that the user agent should fetch and execute, such that the user agent can deliver a faster response once the resource is requested in the future”

The component can also be used to send HTTP link not related to performance. For instance, any link defined in the HTML specification:

<!-- ... -->
    <link rel="alternate" href="{{ link('/index.jsonld', 'alternate') }}">
    <link rel="stylesheet" href="{{ preload('/bootstrap.min.css', {nopush: true}) }}">
<!-- ... -->

The previous snippet will result in this HTTP header being sent to the client:

Link: </index.jsonld>; rel="alternate",</bootstrap.min.css>; rel="preload"; nopush

You can also add links to the HTTP response directly from a controller or any service:

<?php
// src/Controller/BlogPostAction.php
namespace App\Controller;

use Fig\Link\GenericLinkProvider;
use Fig\Link\Link;
use Symfony\Component\HttpFoundation\Request;
use Symfony\Component\HttpFoundation\Response;

final class BlogPostAction
{
    public function __invoke(Request $request): Response
    {
        $linkProvider = $request->attributes->get('_links', new GenericLinkProvider());
        $request->attributes->set('_links', $linkProvider->withLink(new Link('preload', '/bootstrap.min.css')));

        return new Response('Hello');
    }
}

# app/config/routes.yaml
blog_post:
    path: /post
    defaults:
      _controller: 'App\Controller\BlogPostAction'

<?php

// src/Controller/BlogPostAction.php

namespace App\Controller;

use Fig\Link\GenericLinkProvider;

use Fig\Link\Link;

use Symfony\Component\HttpFoundation\Request;

use Symfony\Component\HttpFoundation\Response;

final class BlogPostAction

{

public function __invoke(Request $request): Response

{

$linkProvider = $request->attributes->get('_links', new GenericLinkProvider());

$request->attributes->set('_links', $linkProvider->withLink(new Link('preload', '/bootstrap.min.css')));

return new Response('Hello');

}

# app/config/routes.yaml

blog_post:

path: /post

defaults:

_controller: 'App\Controller\BlogPostAction'

Last but not least, as all Symfony components, WebLink can be used as a standalone PHP library:

<?php

require __DIR__.'/../vendor/autoload.php';

use Fig\Link\GenericLinkProvider;
use Fig\Link\Link;
use Symfony\Component\WebLink\HttpHeaderSerializer;

$linkProvider = (new GenericLinkProvider())
    ->withLink(new Link('preload', '/bootstrap.min.css'));

header('Link: '.(new HttpHeaderSerializer())->serialize($linkProvider->getLinks()));

echo 'Hello';

<?php

require __DIR__.'/../vendor/autoload.php';

use Fig\Link\GenericLinkProvider;

use Fig\Link\Link;

use Symfony\Component\WebLink\HttpHeaderSerializer;

$linkProvider = (new GenericLinkProvider())

->withLink(new Link('preload', '/bootstrap.min.css'));

header('Link: '.(new HttpHeaderSerializer())->serialize($linkProvider->getLinks()));

echo 'Hello';

It is already as a standalone library by the Bolt CMS. While we’re speaking about interoperability, WebLink can deal with any link implementing PSR-13.

Thanks to Symfony WebLink, there is no excuses to not to switch to HTTP/2!

Learn more about these new features in the relevant Pull Requets: #22273 and #21478.

Your Symfony app is slow? Contact Les-Tilleuls.coop, we can help you make it fast!

October 2, 2017 by Kévin Dunglas

Stack2Slack: a Slack bot written in Go to monitor StackOverflow tags

English, Go, Programmation, Réalisations et projets
bot, Go, golang, Slack, StackExchange, StackOverflow
1 Comment

Screenshot of Stack to Slack

At Les-Tilleuls.coop, we use Slack to centralize our communications and notifications. And, as the maintainers of the API Platform framework, we also do our best to help the community on StackOverflow when we have some free time. Until recently we were just checking periodically the StackOverflow website for new questions. But because all our notifications (GitHub, Travis, Twitter…) except the one from StackOverflow were centralized on Slack, it wasn’t optimal.

So I created a tiny Slack bot (just 150 LOC) to monitor StackOverflow (or any other site from the StackExchange galaxy) and automatically post new questions in dedicated Slack channels.

This bot is written in Go, the source code (MIT licensed) as well as binaries are available on GitHub. A Docker image is also available to easily run the daemon locally or on your servers.

To install the bot, start by registering a new Slack bot, the run the daemon. For instance, using Docker:

docker run -e DEBUG=1 -e SLACK_API_TOKEN=<your-API-token> -e TAG_TO_CHANNEL='{"stackoverflow-tag": "slack-channel"}' dunglas/stack2slack

You can monitor as many SO tags as you want, and map and choose in which Slack channel questions must be posted.

Last but not least, if you rely on Kubernetes to manage your servers (or, as we do, use Google Container Engine), you can install Stack to Slack in a single command thanks to the provided Helm chart:

Clone the Git repository: git clone git@github.com:dunglas/stack2slack.git
Install the provided chart: helm install --set slackApiToken=<your-API-token> --set tagToChannel.stackExchangeTag=slackChannel ./chart/stack2slack

If you like this bot, give it a star on GitHub. If you’re looking for skilled Go developers, or bot and API experts, drop us a mail!

September 22, 2017June 18, 2018 by Kévin Dunglas

Symfony Live London: API Platform – Full Stack Framework Resurrection

API Platform, English, PHP, Symfony
Angular, API, API Platform, Docker, Kubernetes, Linked Data, React, Symfony, Symfony Live, Vue.js
2 Comments

Here the video and the slides of my talk of today at Symfony Live London. Rate this talk.

API Platform: Full Stack Framework Resurrection from Les-Tilleuls.coop

Install API Platform. Design the API data model as a set of tiny plain old PHP classes. Instantly get:

Fully featured dev environment with Symfony Flex and React containers, HTTP/2 and HTTPS support and a cache proxy
Pagination, data validation, access control, relation embedding, filters and error handling
Support for modern REST API formats: JSON-LD/Hydra, OpenAPI/Swagger, JSONAPI, HAL, JSON…
GraphQL support
An API responding in a just few milliseconds thanks to the builtin invalidation based cache mechanism
A dynamically created Material Design admini interface (a la Sonata / EasyAdmin – but 100% client-side) built with React
Client apps skeletons: React/Redux, React Native, Vue.js, Angular…

Finally, deploy in 1 command on Google Container Engine or any cloud with a Kubernetes instance with the provided Helm chart.

Yes, you just need is describing a data model, just a few line of codes to get all of that!

September 18, 2017September 24, 2017 by Kévin Dunglas

Upcoming conferences

API Platform, English, PHP, Symfony
API Platform, con, conferences, PHP, semweb, Symfony
Leave a comment

I’ll speak at a lot of conferences until the end of this year, mostly about API Platform and Symfony 4. Here is my schedule:

September, 22: Symfony Live London
API Platform – full stack framework reboot (english)

We’ll start by creating a fully-featured API in just a few minutes with API Platform, Symfony and Doctrine. The API will support pagination, data validation, access control, relation embedding, filters and error handling. It will expose many formats (JSON-LD, Hydra, JSONAPI, HAL, JSON, XML, YAML and CSV), will be documented with Swagger/OpenAPI and will have a nice UI done in React. Last but not least, the API will respond in a just few milliseconds thanks to its builtin invalidation based cache mechanism.

Then, we will use the ReactJS tools provided by the API Platform to consume the exposed Hydra documentation. In a few more minutes, we will get a Material Design administration interface (a la Sonata / EasyAdmin – but 100% client-side) built with React. Finally, we’ll discover 2 nice code generators to bootstrap a SPA (React, Redux and React Router) and iOS and Android mobile apps (React Native).

September, 27: Paris API
API Platform – full stack framework reboot (english)

October, 26: Forum PHP Paris (french)
Développer plus rapidement avec Symfony 4

Symfony est un framework universellement reconnu pour sa qualité, sa fiabilité et sa capacité à propulser les gros projets “entreprise”. Mais depuis quelques années, Symfony s’est également doté de nombreuses fonctionnalités permettant de développer toujours plus rapidement des applications web. Symfony 4 propose des améliorations majeures dans ce domaine grâce à une refonte profonde de la configuration par défaut du framework qui va changer profondément la manière dont nous développons des applications. Au cours de cette présentation, j’aborderai :

Les grands concepts et les nouveautés de Symfony 4: micr-framework par défaut, 12-factor app, nouveaux composants…
Flex, le nouvel installateur surpuissant de Symfony qui peut également installer et configurer automatiquement bibliothèques et bundles
La nouvelle structure de répertoire simplifiée (et sans bundle) de Symfony 4
L’autowiring (qui est désormais activé par défaut), qui permet l’injection automatique des dépendances sans avoir à écrire aucune configuration (fini le YAML et le XML)
Le système de contrôleurs, amélioré et assaini
“Encore”, le nouveau système de gestion des assets (JS, CSS) basé sur Webpack
Les intégrations officielles des bibliothèques Doctrine (ORM), API Platform (API Rest) et EasyAdmin (générateur d’admin)
Comment utiliser facilement Symfony 4 avec Docker du poste de dev jusqu’au déploiement dans le Cloud, grâce à un squelette dédié

A la fin de ce talk, vous saurez comment utiliser Symfony aussi bien pour vos gros projets que pour vos prototypes, vos petites applications et vos “week-end projects”, tout en vous permettant de basculer d’un mode à l’autre.

November, 14: SymfonyCon Cluj
Workshop: getting Started with API Platform (english)

API Plaftorm has become a very popular framework to build advanced and modern API-first web projects with Symfony. This tool will help you to ease the creation of your REST API web projects thanks to its powerful toolkit that includes the following features: schema.org support, linked data, data validation, pagination, filtering, sorting, etc.

November, 16: SymfonyCon Cluj
API Platform – full stack framework reboot (english)

November, 22: SemWeb.Pro (french)
API Platform : le web sémantique pour les masses

API Platform est un framework web qui propose des outils très simple à prendre en main pour créer et consommer des API Linked Data supportant nativement JSON-LD, Hydra et Schema.org.
Cette solution totalement open source (license MIT) est basée sur les technologies familière pour les développeurs web : PHP (et le framework Symfony) et JavaScript (et ReactJS).

Nous découvrirons comment importer un modèle de données depuis Schema.org, l’exposer via une API web compatible Linked Data (via JSON-LD) et l’adapter grâce au framework Symfony.

Cette API sera 100% fonctionnelle, et elle supportera la validation, la pagination, les filtres, l’imbrication de ressources, sera documentée via Swagger et Hydra et disposera d’une interface graphique orientée développeur.

Nous découvrirons ensuite les outils frontend du projet :

Un système d’administration complet (à la Sonata), construit automatiquement en découvrant l’API et bénéficiant d’une interface moderne (Material Design) basée sur React et Redux
Un générateur de code permettant de créer des interfaces webapp ReactJS et applications mobiles React Native.

More TBA.

June 23, 2017 by Kévin Dunglas

[Slides] Dive Into Symfony 4

Here are the slides I presented yesterday during the Lille’s Lille’s Symfony meetup:

Symfony 4 is all about making the developer life easier. You liked using SF for large and robust apps, you’ll love using it for your next MVP, prototype or small project.

This presentation was followed by a live coding session (not recorded, unfortunately).

The New Distribution

Instant Kubernetes Deployment

GraphQL Support

JSON API Support

Declaring API Filters Using Annotations

Help Us: Test, Star, Spread the Word!

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Getting Started

Native Support for to-Many Relations

Detection of More Schema.org’s Types (name, url and email)

Support for Read-only Resources

Easier and Deeper Customization

Ability to Support Other Formats Such as GraphQL

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How does it works?

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