Restful WebServices (Microservices) in Phalcon Framework

About Phalcon:

Phalcon is a full-stack framework. It promotes the MVC architecture and offers features like an ORM, a Request object library, a templating engine, caching, pagination.

In short Phalcon:

Is a PHP C-extension based framework.
Is a C-Extensions are loaded together with PHP one time on the web server’s daemon start process
Is a classes and functions provided by the extension are ready to use for any application
Is a the code is compiled and isn’t interpreted because is already compiled to a specific platform and processor

The preliminary advantage of Phalcon from the fact that it’s entirely C-extension-based. The compiled C extensions are loaded at the beginning of web server’s process and then reside in RAM, allowing Phalcon to process over 2K+ requests per second on (Hexacore,16GB Machine) , nearly three times as many as CodeIgniter is able to manage(which is among the fastest framework available). Other than this aspect, however, it operates more or less the same as any other modern MVC-framework for PHP. It is one of the most appealing frameworks for your upcoming large scale, performance intensive projects.

Phalcon Installation requirements:

1) PHP >=5.3 development resources

notes : If you want to write UT’s then you need php version 5.4.19 . So that Phalcon 2.0 can be installed and incubator can be also installed. For incubator you need phalcon above verison 2.0 .

2)GCC Compiler (Linux) because Phalcon is written in c extension.

3) Git and composer

notes: So that you can clone from git .

Steps to install Phalcon :

1. steps for cloning and building:

git clone –depth=1 git://github.com/phalcon/cphalcon.git

cd cphalcon/build

sudo ./install

2. Now Open Php.ini file add the line given below

extension=phalcon.so

3. After this restart your server

Steps To Install Phalcon Webtool:

Using git (Direct Approach):

If you do not have a git account ,Please make account.

git clone https://github.com/phalcon/phalcon-devtools.git
ln -s /opt/phalcon-devtools/phalcon.php /usr/local/bin/phalcon
chmod +x /usr/local/bin/phalcon

Installation using composer:

If you do not have composer install in your machine please follow these guide lines

First Install Composer using below steps:

https://getcomposer.org/doc/00-intro.md
create directory in /opt/phalcon and go in that dirctory and create composer.json file.

mkdir /opt/phalcon && cd /opt/phalcon
vim composer.json.

Add these lines in your composer.json file
{ “require”: { “phalcon/devtools”: “dev-master” } }
```
 
```

Now execute following commands.

cd /opt/phalcon
composer install
ln -s /opt/phalcon/vendor/phalcon/devtools/phalcon.php /usr/local/bin/phalcon
chmod +x /usr/local/bin/phalcon

To see which commands list phalcon devtool provides
```
 run phalcon commands
```

To create a sample project using devtool

go to directory where you want to create project
run phalcon create-project myFirstApp

after that you get a created project, Following would be the directory structure of your recently created project

myFirstApp/

 app/
    controllers/
    models/
    views/
  public/
    css/
    img/
    js/
    index.php

This is general directory structure for phalcon, but you want develop micro-services which

can be used as plugin anywhere then I suggest follow directory structure.

myFirstApp/

      app/
    config/
    controllers/
    lib/
 manager/
 do/
 dao/
 common/
 factory/
 validator/
    core/
 bootstrap/
  public/
    css/
    img/
    js/
    index.php

Apache Phalcon installation guide:

If you are using .htaccess file

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^$ public/ [L]
RewriteRule ((?s).*) public/$1 [L]
</IfModule>
This re-writes all the URIs to the public/index.php file

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteRule ^((?s).*)$ index.php?_url=/$1 [QSA,L]
</IfModule>

By default index.php will go to Index controller and index action

If you do not want to use .htaccess file Put these lines in your httpd.conf file

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
<Directory “/var/www/test”>
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^$ public/ [L]
RewriteRule ((?s).*) public/$1 [L]
</Directory>

<Directory “/var/www/test/public”>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteRule ^((?s).*)$ index.php?_url=/$1 [QSA,L]
</Directory>
</IfModule>

For virtual host:

<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerAdmin admin@example.host
DocumentRoot “/var/www/myFirstApp/public”
DirectoryIndex index.php
ServerName example.host
ServerAlias www.example.host

<Directory “/var/www/myFirstApp/public”>
Options All
AllowOverride All
Allow from all
</Directory>
</VirtualHost>

Controller class Code :

class IndexController extends ControllerBase

{

public function indexAction() {

echo “Hello Hari”;die;

}

public function shyamAction() {

echo “Hello Shyam”;die;

}

Without any rewrite rule If you want to access index action

http://servername/index.php

Output:

Hello Hari

To access another action i.e. “shyam” the url will be like:

http://servername/index.php?_url=/Index/shyam

Output:

Hello Shyam

To access another controller action other than Default Index, url will be like:

http://servername/index.php?_url=/controllerName/actionName

With rewrite rule:

To access index action

http://servername/Index/index

To access Shyam action

http://servername/Index/shyam

To access other controller and other action in that controllers

http://servername/ControllerName/actionName

For More Details regarding Phalcon please refer below links:

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