API Tools

Installation

Via Composer (create-project)

You can use the create-project command from Composer to create the project in one go:

$ composer create-project laminas-api-tools/api-tools-skeleton path/to/install

Via Git (clone)

First, clone the repository:

$ git clone https://github.com/laminas-api-tools/api-tools-skeleton.git # optionally, specify the directory in which to clone
$ cd path/to/install

At this point, you need to use Composer to install dependencies. Assuming you already have Composer:

$ composer install

All methods

PHP 7.1+ users

If you are on PHP 7.1 or greater, you will want to prepare your skeleton to use the latest versions of dependencies, as several dependencies have new major releases that can make use of the newer PHP versions. To do this, execute the following within your project root:

$ rm composer.lock && rm -rf vendor
$ composer install

and answer any prompts as they occur.

Once you have the basic installation, you need to put it in development mode:

$ cd path/to/install
$ composer development-enable # put the skeleton in development mode

Now, fire it up! Do one of the following:

  • Create a vhost in your web server that points the DocumentRoot to the public/ directory of the project (hardest!).
  • Use the built-in vagrant configuration: vagrant up.
  • Use the built-in docker-compose configuration: docker-compose up.
  • Fire up the built-in web server in PHP (note: do not use this for production!)

In the latter case, do the following:

cd path/to/install
php -S 0.0.0.0:8080 -ddisplay_errors=0 -t public public/index.php

You can then visit the site at http://localhost:8080/ - which will bring up a welcome page and the ability to visit the dashboard in order to create and inspect your APIs.

NOTE ABOUT OPCACHE

Disable all opcode caches when running the admin!

The admin cannot and will not run correctly when an opcode cache, such as APC or OpCache, is enabled. API Tools does not use a database to store configuration; instead, it uses PHP configuration files. Opcode caches will cache these files on first load, leading to inconsistencies as you write to them, and will typically lead to a state where the admin API and code become unusable.

The admin is a development tool, and intended for use a development environment. As such, you should likely disable opcode caching, regardless.

When you are ready to deploy your API to production, however, you can disable development mode, thus disabling the admin interface, and safely run an opcode cache again. Doing so is recommended for production due to the tremendous performance benefits opcode caches provide.

NOTE ABOUT DISPLAY_ERRORS

The display_errors php.ini setting is useful in development to understand what warnings, notices, and error conditions are affecting your application. However, they cause problems for APIs: APIs are typically a specific serialization format, and error reporting is usually in either plain text, or, with extensions like XDebug, in HTML. This breaks the response payload, making it unusable by clients.

For this reason, we recommend disabling display_errors when using the API Tools admin interface. This can be done using the -ddisplay_errors=0 flag when using the built-in PHP web server, or you can set it in your virtual host or server definition. If you disable it, make sure you have reasonable error log settings in place. For the built-in PHP web server, errors will be reported in the console itself; otherwise, ensure you have an error log file specified in your configuration.

display_errors should never be enabled in production, regardless.

Images in the documentation, and the API Tools Admin UI itself, still refer to Apigility. This is due to the fact that we only recently transitioned the project to its new home in the Laminas API Tools. Rest assured that the functionality remains the same.