LaraMod - Modularised Laravel

LaraMod is another approach to a convention-based modularisation of a Laravel-based project. The idea stems from my struggle to organise a Laravel-based project such that I can work effectively and focus better on individual modules such as UserManagement, Authentication, Dashboard, etc. whilst keeping the Laravel code base as intact as possible (this would be convenient for upgrading Laravel) and keeping my code base separate from original Laravel's.

There are some other decent attempts on modalurasing Laravel projects for example here, here or here. Being inspired and learning from these, I start a simple project on my own to dig a bit deeper into Laravel 5. Here I will mainly emphasize the modularisation part, the rest inherits from Laravel 5, so please refer to Laravel's docs.

Quick Start

For the starting point, cloning laramod git repos

git clone https://github.com/htr3n/laramod.git

Then, go into the newly created folder and execute the following commands

composer install
npm install
npm run dev

to retrieve and compile necessary packages for your development environment.

In case you want to test whether LaraMod is working, you can start the local development server via php artisan (note that we must set up the .env beforehand, for instance, copying the existing .env.testing, otherwise Laravel/Laramod will fail to run properly with the error 500).

cp .env.testing .env
php artisan serve

We should see a working web site at http://127.0.0.1:8000.

Technical Details

Conventional Module Structure

The convention of project structure modules in LaraMod is rather straightforward, but naive. The additional folder modules will be the base of the modules. At this release, only one module layer is supported.

Authentication
  |--Controllers
  |--Lang
  |--Migrations
  |--Models
  |--View
  |--routes.php

The meanings of the sub-folders can be easily guessed: Models is for the M, Views is for the V, and Controllers is for the C, of MVC. Lang is for i18n and l10n (translation in Laravel), Migrations for database migration classes. Finally, the file routes.php defines the routes for Authentication.

The structure mentioned above can be quickly generated using the artisan command gen:module provided by the class App\Console\Commands\GenModuleCommand.

php artisan gen:module ModuleA

Module Loading

The loading of a module and its subfolders are defined in modules/ModulesServiceProvider.php.

• First, try to load the modules using the config file config/module.php.

  // an example of 'config/module.php'
  <?php
  return  [
      'modules' => [
          'Core',
          'Login',
          'Dashboard',
          'Home',
          'User',
      ]
  ];

• If config/module.php does not exist or contains no configuration, then ModulesServiceProvider will analyse and load the module based on the above conventional structure.

The class ModulesServiceProvider has then been added to config/app.php:

    'providers' => [
       ...
       \Laramod\ModulesServiceProvider::class
    ]

PSR-4 Autoloading

The PSR-4 autoloading of classes should be updated with the paths and namespaces to your modules accordingly. For instance,

    "psr-4": {
      "App\\": "app/",
      "Core\\": "modules/Core/",
      "Dashboard\\": "modules/Dashboard/",
      "Login\\": "modules/Login/",
      "User\\": "modules/User/",
      "Laramod\\": "modules/"
    }

Access to Module Parts

• Module's controllers, migrations and other classes are mostly PSR-4 autoloaded. Thus, they can be accessed straightforwardly.
• Access to views and international parts (Lang) of each module requires a slightly different syntax, for instance ModuleA::blade_view_name or ModuleA::messages.title. If the ModuleA:: part is missing, Laravel will look for views and language files in the default places.
• The included example views are well organised into substructures of a typical Web site / dashboard, such as nav_top, nav_left.

Caveats

• Stuffs for testing are still in tests.
• Database seeders are still in database/seeds.
• For a smoother integration and better compability of Gentelella Admin (that includes Bootstrap and jQuery), LaraMod does not use any scafffolding (i.e. php artisan preset none)
• I developed some extra generators for handling modules as the original generators provide limited options for generated paths and namespaces and many others.
• To showcase the modularisation, I transformed the original Laravel's authentication part into a module, namely, Login, and updated relevant classes and traits, views and controllers.

Extras

LaraMod also comes with other additions. I love the excellent Laravel Debugbar for debugging and would like to have it in LaraMod:

composer require barryvdh/laravel-debugbar --dev

Besides, LaraMod embraces Twitter's Bootstrap 3 and Gentelella Admin. LaraMod might be used as a starting point for developing a dashboard application. Instead of using Laravel's scafffolding Bootstrap and jQuery, I thought it would be wiser to use the third party plugins enclosed with Gentelella because they have been already tested working together.

• webpack.mix.js defines rules for transforming and copying relevant scripts and styles.

This is how the Web application looks.

Credits

• The excellent Laravel framework developed by Taylor Otwell.
• The idea of modularisation implemented in LaraMod is inspired by Kamran Ahmed's excellent post.
• The beautiful Gentelella Admin theme developed by Aigars Silkalns (puikinsh)