README

Slim Starter

Slim 4 full stack starter template following 2024 best practices and SOLID principles to quickly get started with a scalable PHP web application.

An extensive documentation explains the architecture, components, design choices (i.e. SRP) and features.
Libraries are kept to a minimum and to allow for most flexibility and long-term viability.

Features

The base for this project was the official Slim-Skeleton and Odan's slim4-skeleton but with a lot of additional opinionated features and examples such as:

Pages rendered by a template renderer with layout and versioned assets
The loading example elements from the database (users) via Ajax
The creation, modification, and deletion of users with validation
Integration testing
API endpoint
Dark / light theme switch

This skeleton template is a stripped-down version of the slim-example-project which contains a lot more features and examples.

Technologies

Slim 4 micro-framework
Dependency Injection - PHP-DI
Template rendering - PHP-View (can be replaced by Twig)
Logging - Monolog
Database migrations - Phinx
Validation - cakephp/validation
Query Builder - cakephp/database
Integration testing - PHPUnit
Error handling - slim-error-renderer
GitHub Actions and Scrutinizer
Coding standards fixer - PHP-CS-Fixer
Static code analysis - PHPStan

Requirements

PHP 8.2+
Composer
MariaDB or MySQL database

Installation

1. Create project

Navigate to the directory you want to create the project in and run the following command, replacing project-name with the desired name for your project.

composer create-project samuelgfeller/slim-starter project-name

This will create a new directory with the specified name and install all necessary dependencies.

2. Set up the database

Open the project in your IDE and rename the file config/env/env.example.php to config/env/env.php and add the local database credentials.

Then, create the database for the project and add the name to the config/env/env.dev.php file, like this:

$settings['db']['database'] = 'my_dev_database_name';

After that, create a separate database for testing and add the name to the config/env/env.test.php file.
The database name must contain the word "test" as a safety measure to prevent accidentally truncating the development database while testing.

$settings['db']['database'] = 'my_dev_database_name_test';

The Configuration documentation details the different configuration files and how they are used and loaded.

3. Run migrations

Open the terminal in the project's root directory and run the following command to create the demo table user:

composer migrate

4. Insert demo data

Four demo users can be inserted into the database to test the application and API response by running the following command:

composer seed

5. Update GitHub workflows

To run the project's tests automatically when pushing, update the .github/workflows/build.yml file.
Replace the matrix value "test-database" with the name of your test database as specified in config/env/env.test.php.

If you don't plan on using Scrutinizer, remove the .scrutinizer file at the root of the project, otherwise you can follow this guide on how to set it up.

Done!

That's it! Your project should now be fully set up and ready to use.
If you are using XAMPP and installed the project in the htdocs folder, you can access it in the browser at http://localhost/project-name.
Or you can serve it locally by running php -S localhost:8080 -t public/ in the project's root directory.

Support

Please read the Support❤️ page if you value this project and its documentation and want to support it.

License

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

samuelgfeller / slim-starter

Maintainers

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