Gravel is a PHP library for working with Gravatar avatars.
Gravel is written and maintained by Bobby Allen, the library is licensed under the MIT license.
This library is developed and tested for PHP 7.3+
This library is unit tested against PHP 7.3, 7.4, 8.0, 8.1 and 8.2!
If you need to use an older version of PHP, you should instead install the 2.x version of this library (see below for details).
This client library is released under the MIT license, a copy of the license is provided in this package.
The recommended way of installing the latest version of Gravel is via. Composer; To install using Composer type the following command at the console:
composer require ballen/gravel
You can also manually download the latest version as a zip or tar.gz archive of the library from GitHub and 'include' the Gravatar.php
script (library) and use it standalone if you wish.
If you need to use an older version of PHP, version 2.x.x supports PHP 5.3, 5.4, 5.5, 5.6, 7.0, 7.1 and 7.2, you can install this version using Composer with this command instead:
composer require ballen/gravel ^2.0
Gravel has optional support for Laravel 4.x, 5.x, 6.x, 7.x and 8.x; it comes with a Service Provider which will register the Facade for easy integration.
On Laravel 7.x and 8.x this will be auto-discovered and no need to add it to the config/app.php
$providers
array!
If you are using an earlier version of Laravel you will need to manually enable this, which can be achieved by opening your Laravel application's configuration file config/app.php
(or app/config/app.php
if you are using Laravel 4.x) and add the following lines.
In the $providers
array add the service providers for this package.
Ballen\Gravel\GravelServiceProvider::class,
The Gravatar package will now be autoloaded by the Laravel framework (via. Composer) and use of the library is as simple...
If you have installed the library using Composer or manually you can (as long as your application already requires
or includes
the composer autoload.php
) then you can instantiate a new object instance and use it immediately in your application like so:
use Ballen\Gravel\Gravatar;
$avatar = new Gravatar('bobbyallen.uk@gmail.com');
$avatar->setSize(100); // We want a 100x100px sized avatar instead of the default 120x120px
/**
* You can then obtain the avatar URL either by using the buildGravatarUrl() method or utilising
* the __toString() class method like so:
*/
<image src="<?php echo $avatar; ?>">
There are a number of other "commented" examples on how you can utilise this library can be found in the examples/Examples.php
file.
I decided to implement a Laravel type style (make()
, get()
) for the Laravel Facades therefore it should keep both the hardcore developers (setter and getter prefixed methods) as well as those developers that appreciate cleanly written method names!
If you have added the Laravel Service Provider and Aliases as documented above, you can utilise the library like so:
# Laravel 4.x example
return View::make('userprofile')
->with('gravatar', Gravatar::make('bobbyallen.uk@gmail.com')->size(200)->get());
# Laravel 5.x and 6.x example (using the view() helper method)
return view('userprofile')
->with('gravatar', Gravatar::make('bobbyallen.uk@gmail.com')->size(200)->get());
This library is fully unit tested using PHPUnit.
I use GitHub Actions for continuous integration, which triggers tests for PHP 7.3, 7.4, 8.0, 8.1 and 8.2 every time a commit is pushed.
If you wish to run the tests yourself you should run the following:
# Install the Gravel Library with the 'development' packages this then includes PHPUnit!
composer install
# Now we run the unit tests (from the root of the project) like so:
./vendor/bin/phpunit
Code coverage can also be ran and a report generated (this does require XDebug to be installed)...
./vendor/bin/phpunit --coverage-html ./report
I am happy to provide support via. my personal email address, so if you need a hand drop me an email at: ballen@bobbyallen.me.