Getting Started with SLIM 3, A PHP Microframework

Introduction

Just like the world of JavaScript, in the world of PHP, we have a fairly large amount of frameworks and libraries. We could go on all day listing PHP libraries and still not finish in time for Christmas.

But there are some libraries that separate themselves from the chaff, one such example is the Laravel PHP framework.

Another framework that sets itself apart is SLIM.

What is SLIM?

Taking it straight from the horse’s mouth:

Slim is a PHP micro framework that helps you quickly write simple yet powerful web applications and APIs.

Emphasis on “micro” and “APIs”. SLIM is not robust with lots of features, what makes it so good is the fact that it creates room for extensibility, thus kinda obeying the Open-closed principle.

At its core, Slim is a dispatcher that receives an HTTP request, invokes an appropriate callback routine, and returns an HTTP response. That’s it.

The fact that SLIM doesn’t come with many dependencies makes it one of the best frameworks out there when it comes to API development.

Features of SLIM

When it comes to using SLIM, there are four main features:

• HTTP Router: this allows developers to map functions/callbacks to HTTP methods and URLs.
• Middlewares: serve as layers to allow developers to modify HTTP requests and response. If you need further explanation on middlewares, there is an article here on Scotch that covers Laravel middlewares. Sure the implementations might be a tad different, but they offer the same functionality.
• Dependency Injection: makes it possible for developers to have complete control over managing dependencies within applications.
• PSR-7 support: this is not really a feature, more like a standard. It defines the way HTTP requests and responses should be handled in web applications. You can read more about it on PHP-FIG.

Installing SLIM

To get SLIM installed on your computer, the fastest way is to use composer to install a skeletal version of SLIM. But for this tutorial, we will only install SLIM core and then walk through configuring SLIM for a simple application request-response cycle.

To install SLIM we use composer, we create our working directory (call it whatever you want). Then, we move into that directory and run the following composer command which should install SLIM on our machine.

composer require slim/slim "^3.0"

Basic routing

Ah, the obligatory “Hello World” application. This example will illustrate how easy it is to use SLIM.

In our project directory, we should only see our composer files and a vendor directory. We can then create a index.php file.

In that file, we add this little code snippet.

<?php

require __DIR__ . '/vendor/autoload.php';

$app = new Slim\App;

$app->get('/', function ($request, $response) {
    return 'hello world';
});

$app->run();

First, we load composer’s autoloader, then we create a new instance of the Slim\App, then call a get method to the home path, and pass a closure that takes in the request and response, and then return "hello world" (which is converted to a response object by SLIM. Outside the closure, we run the app.

To see our message in the browser, in the root of our working directory, we boot a PHP server.

php -S localhost:8000

If you open localhost:8000 in the browser, you should see “hello world”. If you use a different server, you should check out the section on server configuration.

Other HTTP methods

The above example only simulated a GET request, as we all know, there are more request types like POST, PUT, PATCH, DELETE, OPTIONS. To use any of these methods in SLIM, we literarily do the same thing we did with the get method above.

<?php

$app->post('/', function ($request, $response) {
    return 'hello world';
});

The above route now will only work for POST requests. We can call the rest of the HTTP methods the same way.

The route discussion in this article is a bit vague, in an upcoming article, we will talk about routing in SLIM.

Render views with Twig

Say we are building an application that is not an API with SLIM, we need a way to organize our templates, not that SLIM requires any template of sorts, but templates make it easier to manage our view files.

There are a lot of templates engines for PHP, but for this tutorial, we will stick with Twig.

Twig allows us to use custom properties to write PHP template files. It compiles to pure PHP code.

To display a variable in twig, we do this.

{{ var }}

This then compiles itself to:

<?php echo $var ?>

We could create global template layouts that we can later extend and keep our page layout and styling consistent.

{% extends "layout.html" %}

{% block content %}
    The content of the page...
{% endblock %}

Twig offers many more features. It is also one of the most stable and best PHP template languages out there. Another alternative to twig is Blade (for Laravel), or Smarty.

Installing Twig

To get started, we need to install Twig, and to do that, we go into the root of our application and run the following command.

composer require slim/twig-view

Now that we have twig installed, let’s create a templates directory at the root of our project. We can now register twig as our view engine/manager in SLIM. In our index.php file, we add this snippet before our routes.

<?php
// ...

$container = $app->getContainer();

$container['view'] = function ($container) {
    $templates = __DIR__ . '/templates/';
    $cache = __DIR__ . '/tmp/views/';

    $view = new Slim\Views\Twig($templates, compact('cache'));

    return $view;
};

First, we grab our app $container and add a new property called view. We name it whatever we want (template, page, etc). Just note that this value is important as we will need to reference it soon. We pass a closure that takes in the $container instance.

Then we create an instance of Slim\Views\Twig and pass in the directory of our templates, and the second parameter is an array (compact converts variables to array key-value pairs) where we can pass the location to our template cache directory.

We can disable caching by setting the $cache variable to false. After that, we can return the $view.

To actually use our view files in our routes, we can go back into our router and then return a view file like this.

$app->get('/', function ($request, $response) {
    return $this->view->render($response, 'home.twig');
});

Server Configuration

There is a 100% chance that you don’t use the PHP default server to serve your app in production. Odds are you choose between Apache and the lovely Nginx. For these servers, our routes won’t work without a little URL rewriting. We see how to configure Apache and Nginx, if you use another server, you can check out the web servers section on SLIM’s website.

Apache

Wherever you decide to make the root of your application, create a new .htaccess file and place the following snippet in that file.

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ^ index.php [QSA,L]

What this does is just serve files and directory that exists on the server, and if they don’t exist then let the routing be handled by our index.php file.

Nginx

server {
    listen 80;
    server_name example.com;
    index index.php;
    error_log /path/to/example.error.log;
    access_log /path/to/example.access.log;
    root /path/to/public;

    location / {
        try_files $uri /index.php$is_args$args;
    }

    location ~ \.php {
        try_files $uri =404;
        fastcgi_split_path_info ^(.+\.php)(/.+)$;
        include fastcgi_params;
        fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
        fastcgi_param SCRIPT_NAME $fastcgi_script_name;
        fastcgi_index index.php;
        fastcgi_pass 127.0.0.1:9000;
    }
}

This configuration is similar to the Apache configuration, don’t forget to replace example.com.

Conclusion

Frameworks like Laravel, Zend, Symfony, etc are really good, but they are not necessary when it comes to building APIs and simple websites (they are too bloated). Slim is an excellent framework, it is easy to use, lightweight, extensible, etc.