Laravel JSON API Demo

This application demonstrates how to use the cloudcreativity/laravel-json-api package to create a JSON API compliant API. This is demonstrated using Eloquent models as the domain records that are serialized in the API, but the package is not Eloquent specific.

Setup

The application uses Homestead, so you'll need Vagrant installed on your local machine.

Once you've cloned this repository, change into the project folder then:

composer install
cp .env.example .env
php vendor/bin/homestead make
vagrant up

Remember you'll need to add an entry for homestead.app in your /etc/hosts file.

Once it is up and running, go to the following address in your browser:

http://homestead.app/api/v1/posts

Explanation

As an example, this API exposes a posts resource. To do this:

1. The resource is registered with the router in app/Http/routes.php
2. A controller exists: app/Http/Controllers/Api/PostsController. This is composed of units that each have a single concern, and can be found in the app/JsonApi/Posts folder:

• An adapter class, that handles finding Post models either from a JSON API resource identifier or from a JSON API search request (filtering, pagination etc).
• A hydrator, that contains the logic for transferring data from the client's request into the domain record (the Post model).
• A schema that handles converting the Post model into its API representation.
• A validators provider, that provides the rules for validating the HTTP content for a create or update request, as well as validating any query parameters.

Eloquent vs Not-Eloquent

This package can handle both Eloquent and non-Eloquent records. You get a lot more functionality out of the box if you are using Eloquent, but it's possible to integrate non-Eloquent records as needed.

This demo includes the following JSON-API resources:

Resource	Record	Eloquent?
comments	App\Comment	Yes
people	App\People	Yes
posts	App\Post	Yes
sites	App\Site	No
tags	App\Tag	Yes

To support our non-Eloquent records, we've created a custom schema and hydrator class in this application. These use traits that are included in the package to replicate the behaviour of the Eloquent schema/hydrator. The custom schema and hydrator are in the App\JsonApi namespace.

Tests

We're big on testing, and the cloudcreativity/laravel-json-api package comes with test helpers to make integration testing a JSON API a breeze. You can see this in action in the tests/Integration folder, where there's a test case for the posts resource.

To run the tests:

vagrant ssh
cd /vagrant
vendor/bin/phpunit