Bolzen is a powerful PHP skeleton web framework that is built using Symfony components and Twig for the template engine. The possibilities of what you can build with Bolzen is unlimited. Bolzen is capable of building both simple and complex web applications or websites. Bolzen follows the principle of Separation of Concern for building a software. Bolzen is layout in a way that allow you to deploy your application in no time. It is designed in a way that little to no configuration is required when deploying to various stages of development such as dev, staging and production.
Bolzen is German for Bolt
- Built using Symfony Components
- Built using Twig 2.0
- Support MVC design patterns and other design patterns
- OOP supported
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Ultimately the goal is to create a web framework where you can just copy over from dev to production without major tweaking / configurations.
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Design to work well all type of hosting whether it be VPS or shared hosting provider platforms. Existing web frameworks made the assumption that the user will have access to the shell,virtualHost file and among other which result in massive configurations need to get them to work. Bolzen is design to work right out of the box. Developers only need to set the configuration within the config/ folder such as directory path,scheme, host, environment. Thus eliminate the need for shell or virtualHost access.
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Include project directory in the path Currently project directory are not include in the route paths by default in most web frameworks. Bolzen include the project directory that was supplied in the config to all routes thus eliminate the need for the developer to include it in the requests
├── Project Directory
├── config
├── .env # create this file when you need to use database
├── config.php
├── core
├── AccessControl
├── Config
├── Container
├── Controller
├── Database
├── Framework
├── Model
├── Request
├── RouteCollection
├── Session
├── Tables
├── Twig
├── User
├── public
├── assets
├── css
├── images
├── js
├── uploads #user uploads files are recommend to goes here
├── .htaccess
├── index.php
├── src
├── app.php
├── container.php
├── template
├── var
├── vendor
.htaccess
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clone the repo git clone https://github.com/kemoycampbell/bolzen
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go into config/ and configure your environment as desired
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If you will be using the database, you must set enableDatabase to true and create a .env in the config/ with the following attributes.
DB_PREFIX= #the database prefix example mysql DB_USER= # the database username DB_PASS=# the database password DB_HOST= # the database host. Can be localhost or an ip DB_NAME= # the name of the database. -
If you would like to use the default bolzen built in user object as well as the role object then you will need to import the tables that are located in the bolzen.sql
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go to your url/projectDirectory/index and you should see a sample homepage
Read below to see how the whole the sample home page was created. Feel free to delete the directory Home in both src and template and attempt to recreate it using the instructions below
- All of our codes will go into the src folder and our template(UI/ html codes) will go into the template folder. If you need to add a image,css or js then those goes into the public/assets/ in its respectively folders.
- You may structure your src/ folders as you see fit. such as
├── src/
├── Model
├── Controller
├── app.php
├── container.php
OR
├── src/
├── Staff
├── Model
├── Controller
├── Supervisor
├── Model
├── Controller
├── app.php
├── container.php
OR any other pattern you choose. You will notice that there are no "View" folder within both structures shown above. This is because all views goes in the template folder which you can structure as you see fit.
Before we make our project complicate with database and all fancy stuff, let us create a simple project. First let us create a home page template called index.php. All template must end with .php. If all is well, you should have a structure similar to below
├── template/
├── Home
├── index.php
with the following code in index.php
<html lang="en">
<head>Index</head>
<body>
<h1> Hello world</h1>
</body>
</html>
next we will need to create a controller that will be responsible for displaying this template. I will create a controller class called HomeController. I will be using the second src structure as shown above hence my src structure will now look like this
├── src/
├── Home
├── Controller
├── HomeController.php
├── app.php
├── container.php
Our controller class will have the following code
<?php
namespace Bolzen\Src\Home\Controller;
use Bolzen\Core\Controller\Controller;
use Symfony\Component\HttpFoundation\Request;
class HomeController extends Controller
{
public function index(Request $request)
{
return $this->render($request);
}
}Finally, we need to add a route which will tell our app the path for the index(what the user type in the url), the controller responsible for displaying the page and the path to the template/Home/index. We can do this by go into src/app.php and add the path there. Add this line to your src/app.php. Your src/app.php should now look like this
<?php
use Symfony\Component\Routing\Route;
use Bolzen\Core\RouteCollection\RouteCollection;
$config = $container->get('config');
$accessControl = $container->get('accessControl');
$routes = new RouteCollection($config, $accessControl);
####################################
# Do not modify the line above
# Your Routes goes here
##################################
$routes->add('Home/index', new Route("index", array(
'_controller'=>'\Bolzen\Src\Home\Controller\HomeController::index'
)));
###############################
# Do not modify below
##############################
return $routes->getRouteCollection();A bit of explaination regarding each parameter, the first parameter is the template page path.
We do not need to add template/ and the .php extension since this is already done by the framework.
The second parameter is the url that goes in the browser and the third is the controller that
is responsible to do some action when the url requested. If all is well, you should be able to visit
http://localhost/projectDirectory/ and hello world should show up. Replace projectDirectory with your
directory name. This is the output of our progress so far
You will need to continue from "Creating a simple website / web application (NO Database)" section. In order to work with database, we will need to create a "Model" which will do some type of interaction with our database. I will go ahead and create a model class called HomeModel.php hence my src will now looks like
├── src/
├── Home
├── Controller
├── HomeController.php
├──Model
├── HomeModel.php
├── app.php
├── container.php
Inside my model, I will just write some codes that list all the users in the account table hence my HomeModel.php class will contain those codes
<?php
namespace Bolzen\Src\Home\Model;
use Bolzen\Core\Model\Model;
class HomeModel extends Model
{
public function listUsers():array
{
//this is equivalent to select columns from table
$table = "accounts";
$columns = "username";
return $this->database->select($table, $columns)->fetchAll();
}
}We will then need to update our controller to call this model thus we will need to modify our controller as follow
<?php
/**
* @author Kemoy Campbell
* Date: 1/2/19
* Time: 6:16 PM
*/
namespace Bolzen\Src\Home\Controller;
use Bolzen\Core\Controller\Controller;
use Bolzen\Src\Home\Model\HomeModel;
use Symfony\Component\HttpFoundation\Request;
class HomeController extends Controller
{
public function index(Request $request)
{
//here we create a instance of our home model
$homeModel = new HomeModel();
//we will then pass the list of users in a user array to the twig context
//so we can use it on the view
return $this->render($request, array("users"=>$homeModel->listUsers()));
}
}Finally we can update our view so it will show the users. We will be using the twig loop syntax. Update the template/Home/index.php with the following codes
<html lang="en">
<head>
<title>Index page</title>
</head>
<body>
<h1> Hello world</h1>
<h3>Here is a list of users</h3>
<ul>
{% for user in users %}
<li>{{user.username}}</li>
{% endfor %}
</ul>
</body>
</html>Refresh your browser and you should be able to see this
contributions are welcome so feel free to submit a pull request. I will merge the change it if fits Bolzen's vision and there are no conflict with the existence code bases.
- Document more usages
- Add composer support
- Nginx configuration