Welcome to the PHP MVC framework

This is an open-source, simple, partially naked MVC framework for building web applications in PHP. It was first created by daveh, but I have modified it making it a boitlerplate for all my future projects.

Starting an application using this framework

1. First, download the framework, either directly or by cloning the repo.
2. Run composer update to install the project dependencies.
3. Configure your web server to have the public folder as the web root.
4. Open .env and enter your database configuration data. Modifying this file instead of the App/Config.php is pretty useful when working with multiple enviroments (e.g separate developement and production server.)
5. Create routes App/Routes.php, add controllers, views and models.

See below for more details.

Configuration

Configuration settings are stored in both .env file and App/Config.php class. Default settings include database connection data, twig cache location and live auto reload ..etc. You can access the settings in your code like this: Config::DB_HOST or Config::env('DB_HOST'). The function env('setting') can be used to retrieve the .env stored settings. If none found, it falls back to the config class const. You can add your own configuration settings to the .env file or App/Config.php.

Routing

The Router translates URLs into controllers and actions. Routes are added in the front controller. A sample home route is included that routes to the index action in the Home controller.

Routes are added with the repond method. You can add fixed URL routes, and specify the controller and action, like this:

$router->respond('GET', '/hello-world', function () {
    return 'Hello World!';
});

Or you can add route variables, like this:

$router->respond('/[:name]', function ($request) {
    return 'Hello ' . $request->name;
});

To specify a controller and action foreach route, use the following method:

$router->respondWithController('GET', '/[:name]', 'controller@action');

in this case the route parameter can be accessed using

$request->name

Since I'm using the Klein.php router, please refer to the documentation for more info about how to use.

Controllers

Controllers respond to user actions (clicking on a link, submitting a form etc.). Controllers are classes that extend the Core\Controller class.

Controllers are stored in the App/Controllers folder. A sample Home controller included. Controller classes need to be in the App/Controllers namespace. You can add subdirectories to organise your controllers, so when adding a route for these controllers you need to specify the namespace (see the routing section above).

Controller classes contain methods that can be called through the router. The sample controller in App/Controllers/Home.php has a sample index action.

You can access route parameters (for example the name parameter shown in the route examples above) in actions via the $request->name property.

Action filters

Controllers can have before and after filter methods. These are methods that are called before and after every action method call in a controller. Useful for authentication for example, making sure that a user is logged in before letting them execute an action. Optionally add a before filter to a controller like this:

/**
 * Before filter. Return false to stop the action from executing.
 *
 * @return void
 */
protected function before()
{
}

To stop the originally called action from executing, return false from the before filter method. An after filter is added like this:

/**
 * After filter.
 *
 * @return void
 */
protected function after()
{
}

IMPORTANT : In order to use the before and after methods implemented, make sure to add Action suffix to the called method in the router.

// Example: the controller has a method called show()
// to execute the before() and after() methods, the route should be something like this:
$router->respondWithController('GET', '/[:name]', 'controller@showAction');
// If you don't want to use the before and after methods, simply do this.
$router->respondWithController('GET', '/[:name]', 'controller@action');

Views

Views are used to display information (normally HTML). View files go in the App/Views folder. Views can be in one of two formats: standard PHP, but with just enough PHP to show the data. No database access or anything like that should occur in a view file. You can render a standard PHP view in a controller, optionally passing in variables, like this:

View::render('Home/index.php', [
    'name'    => 'Dave',
    'colours' => ['red', 'green', 'blue']
]);

The second format uses the Twig templating engine. Using Twig allows you to have simpler, safer templates that can take advantage of things like template inheritance. You can render a Twig template like this:

View::renderTemplate('Home/index.html', [
    'name'    => 'Dave',
    'colours' => ['red', 'green', 'blue']
]);

A sample Twig template is included in App/Views/Home/index.html that inherits from the base template in App/Views/base.html.

HTML Compression for Twig: I've added an HTML Compression extention to twig, so don't forget to add the following tags before and after your html.

    {% htmlcompress %} 
        <html>...</html>
    {% endhtmlcompress %}

Models

Models are used to get and store data in your application. They know nothing about how this data is to be presented in the views. Models extend the Core\Model class and use PDO to access the database. They're stored in the App/Models folder. A sample user model class is included in App/Models/User.php. You can get the PDO database connection instance like this:

$db = static::getDB();

Errors

I'm using Whoops to handle errors. It's better <3. But you can still use this by removing this section from index.php [L39 - L43] :

// Whoops error handling
$whoops = new Whoops\Run();
// Set Whoops as the default error and exception handler used by PHP:
$whoops->register();
$whoops->pushHandler(new Whoops\Handler\PrettyPageHandler());

And replacing it with this :

error_reporting(E_ALL);
set_error_handler('Core\Error::errorHandler');
set_exception_handler('Core\Error::exceptionHandler');

If the SHOW_ERRORS configuration setting is set to true, full error detail will be shown in the browser if an error or exception occurs. If it's set to false, a generic message will be shown using the App/Views/404.html or App/Views/500.html views, depending on the error.

Web server configuration

Pretty URLs are enabled using web server rewrite rules. An .htaccess file is included in the public folder. Equivalent nginx configuration is in the nginx-configuration.txt file.

Built With

• PHP 💕

Used libraries

• twig/twig
• nochso/html-compress-twig
• filp/whoops
• klein/klein ❤️
• vlucas/phpdotenv
• monolog/monolog

Authors

• Dave Hollingworth - Initial work - php-mvc
• Anas Mazouni - php-mvc-boilerplate

See also the list of contributors who participated in this project.

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License - see the LICENSE.md file for details