Download the PHP package websemantics/builder-extension without Composer

This PyroCMS 3 extension once installed becomes your coding companion to scaffold Pyro modules, themes, extensions and stream entities.

Motivation

Here are some of the thoughts and reasons behind building the builder extension,

From the prospective of a developer, Pyro 3 reduces complexity and introduces simplicity and structure into building large scale web applications with its modular design, Modules, Extension, etc and data structure abstraction (ATD), realized in the Stream Platform,

However, with structure comes repetition and the need to use boilerplate code combined with predefined set of steps to integrate that with your application. Usually this is all covered in the documentation, but who has time for that?

This extension tries to remove some of that tedious work so that the developer can focus on writing business logic of the application. To achieve that, the builder offers a number of commands and provide scaffolders for the different aspects of building a Pyro application,

For examples, once installed, the extension will scaffold a software structure called PHP parser, it will configure the module classes with routes, bindings, language file entries and even seeding and even helper functions.

Install

In your project folder, require the extension with composer and then install as follows,

Getting Started

The first command to use when developing a Pyro application with the builder extension is make:addon. The default make:addon command has been extended to enable template-based code scaffolding.

Make Addon

Use the make:addon command as per usual, documentation to create modules, themes and other addon types. However, there are two new concepts that this extension introduces,

1- A available) that the builder downloads and uses to generate code.

2- Each template come with a schema (a list of variable, for example, vendor, slug etc) that the builder uses to scaffold code. These variables have default values but the user will be ask to change their values interactively unless the --defaults option is used to skip the process.

Make Module

The previous command creates a module based on the default module template. The downloaded module template will be cached at storage/streams/default/builder/default-module.

NOTE: A fields migration file will not be generated as per Pyro 3 default make:addon command behaviour. The builder extension generates a separate fields migration file for each stream migration instead.

Make Theme

There are two templates to generate a theme addon, an admin and a front-end.

The --force option forces the extension to download a fresh copy of the template and --admin to create an admin theme. Omit --admin option to create a front-end theme.

Make Addon

The previous uses of make:addon make assumptions about the template to use when creating the addon (default module, pyrocms-theme etc). This behaviour can be changed by providing an optional template name, default-module as follows,

The defaults options disables the user interactive mode and forces the template defaults. This command also supports --shared and --migrate options.

Make Template

A template is like a recipe that the extension uses to scaffold code for an addon type, or any software package for that matter,

The previous command will create a template for the specified addon type, defaults and uses vendor and slug provided as default values for the template schema. More details about templates and how to use them locally can be found at template-template documentation.

List Templates

This command will list all available addon templates from the registry,

Result,

Notice how each template has one star only! :/ Well, you can change that by liking these repos here :)

Clear Cache

To clear the builder cache and delete all locally downloaded templates run the following command,

Make Stream

The builder introduces new abilities to make:stream command, for example, to specify stream properties and fields,

Using the example provided in Auto-pyro to create a todo module, the following will create a Task stream and all of it's assignments,

Instead of specifying the stream slug only, make:stream command now accepts a comma-separated list of fields following the stream slug and properties.

The following is a complete list of options available to use with streams and field. Option values - if applicable - are provided between parentheses (as in the example above),

The Inheritable column indicates the properties a stream would inherit if one of its fields has it set to true. For example,

The previous will generate a stream migration as follows,

If the type property of a field is not set, the builder extension will assume anomaly.field_type.text as default.

Environment Variables

All environment variables used by the extension are listed here,

Configuration file can be found at, ./resources/config/config.php. Overridden in project .env file to change the default behaviour.

Stream Entities

In addition to scaffolding addons from builder templates, the builder offers generating stream entities from migrations. An Entity is a representation of an Object Type which may correspond with a Stream. For example, a Person, a Company or an Animal can all be represented by Streams and Entities.

The code generated for an entity includes an Entity Model and Repository, Plugin, Seeder, Contracts, Table Builder and Form Builder.

Please read the following section for a better understanding of this process.

Building a Blog

The source code of this example is available here. The idea is to build a module with the least amount of effort and experience how the builder extension does its work,

• Create and install a new PyroCMS project and name it blogger,

• Install the builder extension,

• Create a new module, blog

• Create posts stream and its fields,

The result,

This will also generate a seeder template for this entity (see below),

• Add seeder data to, blog/addons/default/websemantics/blog-module/resources/seeders/post.php (singular file name)

The content must be a list of entry values without <?php. This will be added to the Entity Seeder class when the code is (re)generated. This process will be enhanced in the near future with better code parsing.

• Apply the changes by install/reinstall the module,

Check the admin panel to see the new Module in action, url: admin/blog/posts.

The Registry

The idea is to have a collection of reusable Pyro 3 addon templates that can be scaffolded from the command line, similar to what vue-cli offers.

For a full list of what's available through the Builder extension, check the registry at, PyroCMS Templates or use builder:list artisan command.

Development

Once the addon code have been generated and entity files per stream have been created and working correctly with Pyro, you might want to modify and develop the classes individually adding custom code,

The extension provides a configuration options to make your work easy, for example to list the files that you don't want to overwrite accidentally when re-installing a module to regenerating the entity code,

Another example, if you have edited the blog-module/src/Blog/Post/PostModel.php, make sure to list that in the builder config file, blog-module/resources/config/builder.php so that the extension will avoid overwriting these files if they exist.

Here's an example,

Notice how only the last part of the file name (omitted the entity name) is used so that this can be applied globally to all generated entities of the same type,

Configuration

The Builder extension offers many configuration options to fine-tune and enhance your development experience which can be found at blog-module/resources/config/builder.php.

• Add a list of namespaces supported,

This indicates to the builder extension the stream namespaces that your module supports. Add namespaces to this list as appropriate.

• Group entities code under a namespace folder,

When code is generated for an entity, the builder extension saves it under src/{namespace} by default. This is useful when your module handles streams from different namespaces,

To change this behaviour and store under the module src/ folder directly, set the group option to false,

• To seed after a successful install, set the seed option in builder.php,

Turn on and off with true / false values as needed.

• To generate fields and streams permissions set permissions to true,

• To generate sitemap, set the stream_slug for the module main stream, for example pages stream,

The url_method is used to retrieve the resource path, and entries_method should return a filtered collection of stream entries.

• Specify your project docblock to be included with the generated classes,

More settings are detailed in the builder.php file.

Inner Working

Once installed, this extension listens mainly to three event types, StreamWasCreated, AssignmentWasCreated and ModuleWasInstalled.

To enable this extension for your current module, create a config file at resources/config/builder.php and list the namespaces you would like the extension to generate code for. You can listen/generate code to multiple namespaces.

Here's an example of the builder config file taken from Boxed example module github repo.

Once that's done, create your streams migration files as usual. The extension will kick in when it receives the events listed above,

• For StreamWasCreated event, the extension will generate an entity folder for the stream from the template stored at builder-extension/resources/assets/entity/code. The folder map of the entity is as follows:

By default, this folder structure would be generated in a subfolder at src. The name of the subfolder is the namespace of the created stream as explained above.

The extension will then generate a controller per entity at blog-module/src/Http/Controller/Admin/BlogController.php and modify Module, ServiceProvider, Seeder classes and language files to setup the entity to work correctly with the module.

• For AssignmentWasCreated event, the extension will modify two files, BlogTableColumns.php and BlogFormBuilder.php and add a field slug per stream assignment.

• For ModuleWasInstalled event, this will add routes and sections to the module and service provider. It will also seed the module if the builder config file was set accordingly.

Screencasts

To generate screen recordings, follow these steps,

• Install Asciinema and Asciinema 2 Gif

Record a screencast and convert it to a gif image,

The asciinema command will generate a url to the recording, for example, https://asciinema.org/a/e32g9nqayq1dqb9txd063ez8m. Replace the {{id}} in the url provided for asciinema2gif with the one unique id from asciinema url, e32g9nqayq1dqb9txd063ez8m. Read the documentations for more details regarding valid url formats.

Copy the generated file asciicast.gif from the current directory to the desired location.

Support

Need help or have a question? post a questions at StackOverflow

Please don't use the issue trackers for support/questions.

Contribution

Well finally, we are more than happy to accept external contributions to the project in the form of feedback, bug reports and even better - pull requests :)

Resources

• Auto Pyro, a PyroCMS deploy tool for faster development experience.
• Template Template, The default Pyro Builder template for building Pyro Builder templates.
• Registry,a list of all Pyro Builder available template.
• Awesome PyroCMS, a curated list of PyroCMS addons and resources.
• PyroCMS Cheatsheet, A list of commands and features for PyroCMS 3.
• PyroCMS, an MVC PHP Content Management System built to be easy to use, theme and develop with. It is used by individuals and organizations of all sizes around the world.

License

MIT license Copyright (c) Web Semantics, Inc.