noctis/kickstart-app

The user application part of the Kickstart project.

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github.com/Noctis/kickstart-app

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Type:project

4.0.3 2024-12-26 11:54 UTC

Requires

Requires (Dev)

MIT bace1338ea3bcff984cfbf6dcae0cea6649f2c98

  • Lucas Czejgis <lucas.czejgis.woop@gmail.com>

kickstartskeleton appbase application

This package is auto-updated.

Last update: 2025-03-29 00:51:54 UTC

README

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What is it?

It's a skeleton/demo application part of the Kickstart project. The Kickstart project itself consists of two parts:

  • the application part (this one),
  • the system part - the noctis/kickstart package.

This application contains all the files the user should be able to modify in order to create their own Kickstart-based application.

What's it good for?

Kickstart was created to be a base for building micro and small PHP applications, either Web- or CLI-based.

OK, so how do I install this thing?

IMPORTANT: Kickstart has two major platform requirements:

  • PHP 8.1.x,
  • Composer 2.0.x.

To create a new project Kickstart-based project, run the following command in your CLI and let Composer do its thing:

$ composer create-project noctis/kickstart-app app-name

IMPORTANT: replace app-name in the command above with whatever name you want. app-name is the name of the folder which will be created in the current working directory.

Developing Your App using Docker

Everything you should know about developing your Kickstart-based application can be found in this document.

OK, it installed. Now what?

Now you're free to modify/add files in the app-name folder (or whatever you changed it to) to build your application. I've included some demo/dummy files within the project to help you get started. You're free to remove those files altogether if you have no use for them. Instructions on how to do that can be found here.

IMPORTANT: If you're building a Web-based application, configure your WWW server to serve files from the public directory.

Application Components

A fresh Kickstart-based project consists of a couple of things:

  • Configuration,
  • HTTP Actions (with templates/views),
  • Console Commands,
  • Service Providers,
  • Database Repositories,
  • Services.

Configuration

The project's configuration can be found in the .env file, in its root directory.

NEVER COMMIT THE .env FILE IN YOUR PROJECT - IT CONTAINS SENSITIVE INFORMATION WHICH MUST REMAIN PRIVATE!

This is how the .env file looks by default:

# Valid values: prod, dev
APP_ENV=dev
# "/" for root-dir, "/foo" (without trailing slash) for sub-dir
basehref=/
db_host=localhost
db_user=dbuser
db_pass=dbpass
db_name=dbname
db_port=3306

Here's a rundown of what each of these options mean:

APP_ENV

This option can take one of two values:

  • prod, or
  • dev.

Setting it to prod changes three things:

  • PHP error messages are hidden,
  • templates (views) are cached; any changes made to them will NOT be visible upon refreshing the page in the browser,
  • the DIC (dependency injection container) will be compiled & saved into a file (in var/cache/container by default), which will increase the application's performance, but at the cost of the DIC ignoring any changes in dependency injection's configuration from here on out.

Setting it to dev causes:

  • PHP error messages to be displayed,
  • templates (views) are not cached; any changes made to them will immediately be visible upon refreshing the page in the browser,
  • the DIC will notice any changes made to the dependency injection configuration, at the cost of slightly worse application's performance.

This option should be set to prod in production environments, and set to dev during development.

If you're making changes to your templates/views and they're not showing up in your browser - either clear the cache, by deleting the contents of the var/cache/templates directory, or set the APP_ENV option in .env to dev.

If you're making changes to service providers or classes' constructors (dependency injection) and the DIC (dependency injection container) fails to see them, clear the contents of the var/cache/container directory or set the APP_ENV option in .env file to dev

basehref

This is the URI of where the application is available from the browser. If it's available at, for example: localhost, the default value of / should be used. If it's available in a sub-directory, for example: localhost/kickstart, the basehref value should be set to /kickstart.

IMPORTANT: The barehref value in .env and the RewriteBase value in public/.htaccess file should always be the same! If those values are different, you'll be getting a lot of 404 errors.

For console commands the value of this parameter does not matter.

db_host, db_user, db_pass, db_name, db_port

Those 5 options are the database credentials:

  • db_host - host name for your database (e.g. localhost),
  • db_port - port number (default: 3306),
  • db_user - database user name,
  • db_pass - database user password,
  • db_name - the name of the database.

HTTP Actions

You can read more about HTTP actions here.

Console Commands

You can read more about Console Commands here.

Database Repositories

Kickstart utilizes the Repository pattern, more or less. You call the appropriate methods on a repository object when you want to fetch or store something from/to the database.

By default, repository classes can be found in the src/Repository folder (the App\Repository namespace). All repositories which utilize the database connection extend the Noctis\KickStart\Repository\AbstractDatabaseRepository abstract class, which provides a protected field called $db representing the database connection.

Kickstart utilizes ParagonIE's EasyDB package for running queries against the database engine of your choice. EasyDB is a simple wrapper around PHP's PDO, which in my opinion is way easier to use than PDI itself. If you want to know more on why I chose EasyDB and not a different library, check the FAQ.

Service Providers

You can read more about Service Providers here.

Folders

You can read more about what each folder in your project's directory is here.

Updating

If you need to update the system part of your application, i.e. the noctis/kickstart package, just run:

$ composer update noctis/kickstart

Seeing as updating a Kickstart-based project is not as simple as that, I will do my best to update the noctis/kickstart-app package (this one) as rarely as possible. When I do release a new version of it and specific actions are needed to update the application part, you will find a version-specific guide inside the docs/upgrading folder of this project.

I will also keep the version numbers between both packages consistent. For example, when I make changes to the noctis/kickstart package that are incompatible with noctis/kickstart-app 2.x, I will release them as version 3.x of the former, along with an updated 3.x version of the latter. This way a composer update will not break your Kickstart application.

FAQ

Additional questions and answers relating to Kickstart can be found in the FAQ.

Recipes