readme.md

Flywheel

A lightweight, flat-file, document database for PHP that can store data in JSON, YAML or Markdown formats.

Often MySQL can be overkill for a small site or blog installation. Although it's present by as standard on many hosting packages it still requires several manual steps including configuration, user and databases creation etc.

Additionally, content stored in MySQL databases is impossible (or at least very difficult) to track using version control software. This makes sharing a site or app between a team difficult, requiring everybody to have access to a master database or their own copy. There's also complications when apps are setup on staging servers and changes that users make must be reflected in a developer's local copy. You've probably come up against this issue in the past and it's all a bit of a mess.

Flywheel hopes to enable a new breed of PHP apps and libraries by giving developers access to a datastore that acts in a similar way to a traditional database but has no external dependencies. Documents (essentially associative arrays), can be saved and retrieved, sorted and limited.

Currently Flywheel is in heavy development and is not production ready yet. You might find that documents created from one version of Flywheel can't be loaded by another right now. As we get closer and closer to a v1 this is less likely to happen.

Flywheel is opinionated software. The following is assumed:

• Simple data structures are best.
• You're not going to be storing tens of thousands of documents.

Requirements

• PHP 5.3+
• Composer

Installation

Use Composer to install the flywheel package. Package details can be found on Packagist.org.

Add the following to your composer.json and run composer update.

"require": {
    "jamesmoss/flywheel": "dev-master"
}

Use

$config = new \JamesMoss\Flywheel\Config('path/to/writable/directory');
$repo = new \JamesMoss\Flywheel\Repository('posts', $config);

// Storing a new document
$post = new \JamesMoss\Flywheel\Document(array(
    'title'     => 'An introduction to Flywheel',
    'dateAdded' => new \DateTime('2013-10-10'),
    'body'      => 'A lightweight, flat-file, document database for PHP...',
    'wordCount' => 7,
));

echo $post->title; // An introduction to Flywheel
echo $post->wordCount; // 7

$id = $repo->store($post);

echo $id; // Czk6SPu4X
echo $post->id; // Czk6SPu4X

// Retrieving documents
$posts = $repo->query()
    ->where('dateAdded', '>', new \DateTime('2013-11-18'))
    ->orderBy('wordCount DESC')
    ->limit(10, 5)
    ->execute();

echo count($posts); // 5 the number of documents returned in this result
echo $posts->total() // 33 the number of documents if no limit was applied. Useful for pagination.

foreach($posts as $post) {
    echo $post->title;
}

// Updating documents
$post->title = 'How to update documents';

// Updates the document (only if it already exists)
$repo->update($post); 

// Updates the document (if it doesnt exist, it gets inserted)
$repo->replace($post); 


// Deleting documents - you can pass a document or it's ID.
$repo->delete($post);
$repo->delete('Czk6SPu4X');

Formats

By default documents are saved and parsed as JSON as it's fast and encoding/decoding is built into PHP. There are two other serialisation formats you can choose too, YAML and Markdown (with YAML front matter).

You can choose the format by passing it into the Config when you initialise it.

$config = new Config('/path/to/writable/directory', array(
    'formatter' => new \JamesMoss\Flywheel\Formatter\YAML,
))

The following formatter classes are available.

• \JamesMoss\Flywheel\Formatter\JSON - Will attempt to pretty print output if using PHP 5.4+. File extension is json.
• \JamesMoss\Flywheel\Formatter\YAML - Uses yaml file extension, not yml.
• \JamesMoss\Flywheel\Formatter\Markdown - Takes an optional parameter in the constructor which dictates the name of the main field in the resulting Document (Defaults to body). File extension is md. Markdown isn't converted into HTML, that's up to you.

Important If you use the YAML or Markdown formatters when using the --no-dev flag in Composer you'll need to manually add symfony\yaml to your composer.json. Flywheel tries to keep it's dependencies to a minimum.

If you write your own formatter it must implement \JamesMoss\Flywheel\Formatter\Format.

Todo

• More caching around Repository::findAll.
• Indexing
• HHVM support.
• Abstract the filesystem, something like Gaufrette or Symfony's Filesystem component?
• Atomic updates.
• Events system.
• Option to rehydrate dates as datetime objects?
• More serialisation formats? PHP serialized, PHP raw?
• More mocks in unit tests.
• Simple one-to-one and many-to-one joins.

Running tests

There is good test coverage at the moment. If you'd like to run the tests yourself, use the following:

$ composer install
$ phpunit

Contributing

If you spot something I've missed, fork this repo, create a new branch and submit a pull request. Make sure any features you add are covered by unit tests and you don't break any other tests.