Simple PHP Chat Backend

• Lumen micro-framework is used for this project.

• All API codes are under app/Chat folder.

• Output format is JSON but i created an interface to add more types in future.

• I used Eloquent ORM of the framework but used Repository pattern to make easy to change it.

• No any authentication system, so everybody can add a message using user ids.

• There are some dummy data in SQLite db.

• I wrote migrations to create DB tables but you need to add some user manually. You can use DB Browser for SQLite software.

• You can create an empty file and use php artisan migrate command to generate the tables.

• Routing codes are in routes/web.php file.

• There are some unit tests on tests/MessageTest.php file

• Created a Service Provider for Chat and added it to Laravel's bootstrap/app file to register it

• Used Laravel's validation facade to validate input datas and improve security

#General Folder Structure

├───app
│ ├───Chat
│ │ └───Controllers
│ │ └───Models
│ │ └───Repositories
│ │ └───Views
│ ├───Http
│ │ └───Controllers
├───database
│ ├───migrations
├───routes
├───tests

Usage

Get unread messages of a user:

• GET yourdomain/user/messages

• Send a valid user_id (int)

• It returns messages with user data

• Example return message: [{"id":63,"user_id":"2","message":"Demo message","created_at":"2017-01-11 13:45:03","updated_at":"2017-01-11 13:45:03","is_read":"0","target_user_id":"3","user":{"id":2,"name":"Koray","created_at":2017-01-01,"updated_at":null},"target_user":{"id":3,"name":"John","created_at":2017-01-01,"updated_at":null}}]

Add a message to a user:

• POST yourdomain/user/messages

• Send a valid user_id (int), target_user_id (int) and message (string)

• It updates the messages as read and returns them

• Example return message: {"user_id":2,"message":"Test","target_user_id":3,"updated_at":"2017-01-11 13:53:18","created_at":"2017-01-11 13:53:18","id":64}

Installation

• composer install
• duplicate .env.example file and rename it as .env
• open .env file
• Set a app key that is random 32 character (not required)
• Set DB_CONNECTION as sqlite
• Set DB_DATABASE AS /YOUR-FULL-PATH/simple-chat-backend/database/db.sqlite
• Change YOUR-FULL-PATH with your installation path

REQUIREMENTS

• PHP >= 7.*
• OpenSSL PHP Extension
• PDO PHP Extension
• Mbstring PHP Extension

TODO

• Ordering options for get user messages API
• Exceptions and error codes
• Update a message
• Delete a message
• Add database seeds
• Mocking for tests
• Add more output types (HTML, XML, etc)
• Authentication