Build APIs in Laravel With the Restify Package

 Laravel Restify is a package to make a powerful JSON:API-compatible Rest API with Laravel. After installing the package and following the setup guide, you can get started quickly using the repository CLI:

1php artisan restify:repository Dream --all

The repository is the core of this package. The example command above would generate a blank repository that you could add fields to, like the following example:

 1namespace App\Restify;
 2 
 3use App\Models\Dream;
 4use Binaryk\LaravelRestify\Http\Requests\RestifyRequest;
 5 
 6class DreamRepository extends Repository
 7{
 8    public static string $model = Dream::class;
 9 
10    public function fields(RestifyRequest $request): array
11    {
12        return [
13            id(),
14            field('title')->required(),
15            field('description'),
16            field('image')->image(),
17        ];
18    }
19}

If you don't define the $model property, Restify can guess based on the repository class name (i.e., DreamRepository would be the Dream model).

Here's an example of the built-in UserRepository class (you would want to protect this in a real app) that will return an API response in JSON API format:

 1GET: /api/restify/users?perPage=10&page=2
 2{
 3  "meta": {
 4    "current_page": 1,
 5    "from": 1,
 6    "last_page": 1,
 7    "path": "http://localhost:8000/api/restify/users",
 8    "per_page": 15,
 9    "to": 1,
10    "total": 1
11  },
12  "links": {
13    "first": "http://localhost:8000/api/restify/users?page=1",
14    "next": null,
15    "path": "http://localhost:8000/api/restify/users",
16    "prev": null,
17    "filters": "/api/restify/users/filters"
18  },
19  "data": [
20    {
21      "id": "1",
22      "type": "users",
23      "attributes": {
24        "name": "Paul Redmond",
25        "email": "paul@example.com"
26      }
27    }
28  ]
29}

This package also walks you through the authentication process, advanced filtering, and more!

Learn More

To get started, I recommend watching the Restify Course, which has 24 lessons on using Restify to build an API with Laravel. You can also read the official documentation to install this package and start using it in your applications. Finally, you can see the source code and contribute on GitHub at BinarCode/laravel-restify.

Read More

Profile Your Laravel Application With Xhprof

 The laravel-xhprof package makes it easy to use Xhprof to profile your laravel application. This package includes profiling for your web application routes and the Artisan console.

XHProf is a function-level hierarchical profiler for PHP and has a simple HTML based navigational interface. The raw data collection component is implemented in C (as a PHP extension). The reporting/UI layer is all in PHP. It is capable of reporting function-level inclusive and exclusive wall times, memory usage, CPU times and number of calls for each function. Additionally, it supports ability to compare two runs (hierarchical DIFF reports), or aggregate results from multiple runs.

Along with the Laravel side of this package that will trace your requests when XHPROF_ENABLED=true in your .env file, you can visualize the profiling with XHGUI, which uses a database backend, and pretty graphs to make it easy to use and interpret:

The laravel-xhprof GitHub repo has all the instructions you need to set up the XHProf PHP module, the GUI, database configuration, and more.

Read More