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What is Flight?

Flight is a fast, simple, extensible framework for PHP. Flight enables you to quickly and easily build RESTful web applications.

Learn more

Requirements

Flight requires PHP 7.4 or greater.

License

Flight is released under the MIT license.

Installation

1. Download the files.

If you're using Composer, you can run the following command:

OR you can download them directly and extract them to your web directory.

2. Configure your webserver.

For Apache, edit your .htaccess file with the following:

Note: If you need to use flight in a subdirectory add the line RewriteBase /subdir/ just after RewriteEngine On.

For Nginx, add the following to your server declaration:

3. Create your index.php file.

First include the framework.

If you're using Composer, run the autoloader instead.

Then define a route and assign a function to handle the request.

Finally, start the framework.

Routing

Routing in Flight is done by matching a URL pattern with a callback function.

The callback can be any object that is callable. So you can use a regular function:

Or a class method:

Or an object method:

Routes are matched in the order they are defined. The first route to match a request will be invoked.

Method Routing

By default, route patterns are matched against all request methods. You can respond to specific methods by placing an identifier before the URL.

You can also map multiple methods to a single callback by using a | delimiter:

Regular Expressions

You can use regular expressions in your routes:

Named Parameters

You can specify named parameters in your routes which will be passed along to your callback function.

You can also include regular expressions with your named parameters by using the : delimiter:

Matching regex groups () with named parameters isn't supported.

Optional Parameters

You can specify named parameters that are optional for matching by wrapping segments in parentheses.

Any optional parameters that are not matched will be passed in as NULL.

Wildcards

Matching is only done on individual URL segments. If you want to match multiple segments you can use the * wildcard.

To route all requests to a single callback, you can do:

Passing

You can pass execution on to the next matching route by returning true from your callback function.

Route Info

If you want to inspect the matching route information, you can request for the route object to be passed to your callback by passing in true as the third parameter in the route method. The route object will always be the last parameter passed to your callback function.

Extending

Flight is designed to be an extensible framework. The framework comes with a set of default methods and components, but it allows you to map your own methods, register your own classes, or even override existing classes and methods.

Mapping Methods

To map your own custom method, you use the map function:

Registering Classes

To register your own class, you use the register function:

The register method also allows you to pass along parameters to your class constructor. So when you load your custom class, it will come pre-initialized. You can define the constructor parameters by passing in an additional array. Here's an example of loading a database connection:

If you pass in an additional callback parameter, it will be executed immediately after class construction. This allows you to perform any set up procedures for your new object. The callback function takes one parameter, an instance of the new object.

By default, every time you load your class you will get a shared instance. To get a new instance of a class, simply pass in false as a parameter:

Keep in mind that mapped methods have precedence over registered classes. If you declare both using the same name, only the mapped method will be invoked.

Overriding

Flight allows you to override its default functionality to suit your own needs, without having to modify any code.

For example, when Flight cannot match a URL to a route, it invokes the notFound method which sends a generic HTTP 404 response. You can override this behavior by using the map method:

Flight also allows you to replace core components of the framework. For example you can replace the default Router class with your own custom class:

Framework methods like map and register however cannot be overridden. You will get an error if you try to do so.

Filtering

Flight allows you to filter methods before and after they are called. There are no predefined hooks you need to memorize. You can filter any of the default framework methods as well as any custom methods that you've mapped.

A filter function looks like this:

Using the passed in variables you can manipulate the input parameters and/or the output.

You can have a filter run before a method by doing:

You can have a filter run after a method by doing:

You can add as many filters as you want to any method. They will be called in the order that they are declared.

Here's an example of the filtering process:

This should display:

Hello Fred! Have a nice day!

If you have defined multiple filters, you can break the chain by returning false in any of your filter functions:

Note, core methods such as map and register cannot be filtered because they are called directly and not invoked dynamically.

Variables

Flight allows you to save variables so that they can be used anywhere in your application.

To see if a variable has been set you can do:

You can clear a variable by doing:

Flight also uses variables for configuration purposes.

Views

Flight provides some basic templating functionality by default. To display a view template call the render method with the name of the template file and optional template data:

The template data you pass in is automatically injected into the template and can be reference like a local variable. Template files are simply PHP files. If the content of the hello.php template file is:

The output would be:

Hello, Bob!

You can also manually set view variables by using the set method:

The variable name is now available across all your views. So you can simply do:

Note that when specifying the name of the template in the render method, you can leave out the .php extension.

By default Flight will look for a views directory for template files. You can set an alternate path for your templates by setting the following config:

Layouts

It is common for websites to have a single layout template file with interchanging content. To render content to be used in a layout, you can pass in an optional parameter to the render method.

Your view will then have saved variables called header_content and body_content. You can then render your layout by doing:

If the template files looks like this:

header.php:

body.php:

layout.php:

The output would be:

Custom Views

Flight allows you to swap out the default view engine simply by registering your own view class. Here's how you would use the Smarty template engine for your views:

For completeness, you should also override Flight's default render method:

Error Handling

Errors and Exceptions

All errors and exceptions are caught by Flight and passed to the error method. The default behavior is to send a generic HTTP 500 Internal Server Error response with some error information.

You can override this behavior for your own needs:

By default errors are not logged to the web server. You can enable this by changing the config:

Not Found

When a URL can't be found, Flight calls the notFound method. The default behavior is to send an HTTP 404 Not Found response with a simple message.

You can override this behavior for your own needs:

Redirects

You can redirect the current request by using the redirect method and passing in a new URL:

By default Flight sends a HTTP 303 status code. You can optionally set a custom code:

Requests

Flight encapsulates the HTTP request into a single object, which can be accessed by doing:

The request object provides the following properties:

You can access the query, data, cookies, and files properties as arrays or objects.

So, to get a query string parameter, you can do:

Or you can do:

RAW Request Body

To get the raw HTTP request body, for example when dealing with PUT requests, you can do:

JSON Input

If you send a request with the type application/json and the data {"id": 123} it will be available from the data property:

HTTP Caching

Flight provides built-in support for HTTP level caching. If the caching condition is met, Flight will return an HTTP 304 Not Modified response. The next time the client requests the same resource, they will be prompted to use their locally cached version.

Last-Modified

You can use the lastModified method and pass in a UNIX timestamp to set the date and time a page was last modified. The client will continue to use their cache until the last modified value is changed.

ETag

ETag caching is similar to Last-Modified, except you can specify any id you want for the resource:

Keep in mind that calling either lastModified or etag will both set and check the cache value. If the cache value is the same between requests, Flight will immediately send an HTTP 304 response and stop processing.

Stopping

You can stop the framework at any point by calling the halt method:

You can also specify an optional HTTP status code and message:

Calling halt will discard any response content up to that point. If you want to stop the framework and output the current response, use the stop method:

JSON

Flight provides support for sending JSON and JSONP responses. To send a JSON response you pass some data to be JSON encoded:

For JSONP requests you, can optionally pass in the query parameter name you are using to define your callback function:

So, when making a GET request using ?q=my_func, you should receive the output:

If you don't pass in a query parameter name it will default to jsonp.

Configuration

You can customize certain behaviors of Flight by setting configuration values through the set method.

The following is a list of all the available configuration settings:

flight.base_url - Override the base url of the request. (default: null)
flight.case_sensitive - Case sensitive matching for URLs. (default: false)
flight.handle_errors - Allow Flight to handle all errors internally. (default: true)
flight.log_errors - Log errors to the web server's error log file. (default: false)
flight.views.path - Directory containing view template files. (default: ./views)
flight.views.extension - View template file extension. (default: .php)

Framework Methods

Flight is designed to be easy to use and understand. The following is the complete set of methods for the framework. It consists of core methods, which are regular static methods, and extensible methods, which are mapped methods that can be filtered or overridden.

Core Methods

Extensible Methods

Any custom methods added with map and register can also be filtered.

Framework Instance

Instead of running Flight as a global static class, you can optionally run it as an object instance.

So instead of calling the static method, you would call the instance method with the same name on the Engine object.