Building API Service for News Management with Lumen

The stunningly fast micro-framework by Laravel. More info at https://lumen.laravel.com

Getting Started

These instructions will get you a copy of the project up and running on your local machine for development and testing purposes.

Set up Lumen project

Open terminal and move to the project root directory

cd ~/full/path/to/lumen-redis

Here we assume that our Apache and MySQL server are running.

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Copy .env.example file to .env

cp .env.example .env

Install dependencies

composer install

Then, we have to migrate our migration files to create our tables and seed default data for users and roles (in database/migrations and database/seeds)

Don't forget to create new database named news, we will use it as our database in this project as mentioned in our .env file (DB_DATABASE=news).

php artisan migrate && php artisan db:seed

It will creates 2 default users for us, Admin and User. So, keep in mind we will use these credentials to get access_token when login.

Admin -> John Doe
username: admin@gmail.com
password: john123

User -> Jane Doe
username: user@gmail.com
password: jane123

Install Laravel Passport

In order to make laravel passport work for Lumen, we are going to use dusterio/lumen-passport package, a simple service provider for Laravel Passport. For more detail visit https://github.com/dusterio/lumen-passport

Then, run command below to install passport

php artisan passport:install

It will generates 2 clients for us

Personal access client created successfully.
Client ID: 1
Client secret: bo72cMzHsoXcIU5sTIYIZzD0qlfSa6VYJf8J5KYk
Password grant client created successfully.
Client ID: 2
Client secret: 6UzPDESm8pQ4o474cKh6MPFLLBK0LgfiB3rLjjSu

Create Symlink for Storage Public Folder

Lumen's artisan doesn't support storage, that's why we can't use php artisan storage:link in Lumen.

So, we have to create it manually with ln -s source_file symbolic_link, example:

mkdir storage/app/public
ln -s ~/full/path/to/lumen-redis/storage/app/public ~/full/path/to/lumen-redis/public/storage

Replace ~/full/path/to/ with your full path of your project directory.

Run Our Project

Run command below to serve our project locally, we are going to use port 8888

php -S localhost:8888 -t public

Now we can access our project with url http://localhost:8888

Install Redis

In this project, i used redis queue for queuing the comment creation process.

So, we have to install redis server with following command

brew install redis

More instructions click here

Test redis server

redis-cli ping

If it replies PONG, then it works!

Testing Our API

To test our API, click button bellow :

or

visit Postman Documenter Link below :

https://documenter.getpostman.com/view/6993569/SzKWuxsz

Then click Run in Postman button on top right and Open with Postman for Mac/Windows

You can test every single endpoint in the postman collection

-- Note --

If it's failed to run from the link above, you can import it manually via Import From Link tab in Import window :

Collection link :

https://www.getpostman.com/collections/3519adb63ec9d1e7664c

Remember!

You have to create and use local environment manually, then add bearer variable in it with value Bearer <access_token> from login API (POST : /v1/oauth/token)

Testing Redis Queue

Now we are going to test our queue job with redis. In the project, we have 1 job (CommentJob.php) created in app/Jobs directory.

The comment job will be called in NewsCommentController.php when we hit comment creation API (POST : /v1/news/:id/comment)

// Create job for saving a comment
$job = new CommentJob($news, [
    'user_id'       => Auth::user()->id,
    'comment'       => $request->input('comment'),
    'created_by'    => Auth::user()->id
]);

// Add delay time to the job for 60 seconds, to see that our job is running and exist in redis-cli
$this->dispatch($job->delay(60));

-- Notes --

Please login as Admin and create 1 news, then remember we will use the created news ID to post a comment later.

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Before hitting the comment creation API, Make sure Redis Server is already installed and run command below in the project root directory to listen our queue job :

php artisan queue:listen

and then hit comment creation API (POST : /v1/news/:id/comment) and wait for the queue job to work about 60 seconds (mentioned above : $job->delay(60))

In the meantime, run command below :

redis-cli

Then, in Redis server run :

keys *

If it replies with 1) "queues:default:delayed", our job has been queued and delayed as expected in Redis server.

You can run keys * command repeatedly until the list is empty indicates that the job is done.

Let's check our posted comment in news list API (GET : /v1/news) and look for the news we commented on it. Or, of course we can check it in our database table (news_comments) for a shortcut ;)

Conclusion

It's nice to use Lumen for API implementation, even though many services or libraries from Laravel are trimmed. So, we have to look for someone created a service provider to make it work with Lumen.

And for me, in this project i learned a lot of things such as API Resources, Form Requests, Design Pattern, Event Listener, Queue Job and of course implementing Queue with Redis is new to me.

I don't know i have implemented correctly or not, i will figure it out and keep learning.

Cheers :)

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