PHP Modules

Declare clear dependencies within your application by defining which modules have access to other parts of your application.

Installation

This package will soon be published on Packagist, however it is still in development.

Features

Run module checks on your codebase using the test command

./vendor/bin/modules test

Generate a dependency graph, make sure you have installed GraphViz for this.

./vendor/bin/modules graph

Defining modules

Your modules.php file in the root of your project will be where your configuration will live. This file should return an instance of PhpModules\Lib\Modules.

Let's say we have a module in the namespace App\Http that depends on App\Persistence, we can define this as follows:

<?php

$persistence = PhpModules\Lib\Module::create('App\Persistence');
$http = PhpModules\Lib\Module::create('App\Http', [$persistence]);

return Modules::builder('./src')->register([$persistence, $http])

It is by design that you can't create cyclic dependencies since this is the thing that we are trying to avoid with this design pattern.

Strict modules

Explicitly define which classes are exported from your modules. Most modules will have an explicit public api which internally might have a lot of helper classes and other logic. For example a App\Persistence module might have a App\Persistence\PersistedUser and App\Persistence\UserRepository as public api but might want to hide the App\Persistence\Drivers\MySQLDriver to prevent other modules meddling with database configurations.

Define strict modules using Module::strict:

<?php

$persistence = PhpModules\Lib\Module::strict('App\Persistence');
$http = PhpModules\Lib\Module::strict('App\Http', [$persistence]);

return Modules::builder('./src')->register([$persistence, $http])

Mark classes as public using PHPDoc:

/**
 * @public
 */
class PersistedUser {}

Working with external dependencies or legacy codebases

Even though it is encouraged to try and be as explicit as possible in defining your dependencies, external dependencies (such as frameworks) or legacy codebases require a lot of configuration to get started.

To allow importing from parts of your application not yet defined as a module, or external libraries we can add ->allowUndefinedModules() to our Modules configuration.

For example, your App\Persistence layer might depend on Laravel's Eloquent (if you're into such thing) without you having to explicitly declare it:

<?php

$persistence = PhpModules\Lib\Module::create('App\Persistence');
$http = PhpModules\Lib\Module::create('App\Http', [$persistence]);

return Modules::builder('./src') 
    ->allowUndefinedModules()
    ->register([$persistence, $http])