Black Panther REST API with Lumen and Cloudinary

Black Panther Banner
Black Panther Banner

About a week ago(15th February, 2018), the first Black Panther movie was premiered in cinemas around the world. Woop! Woop! I am a huge Marvels movies(and some Sci-fi) and a keen follower of the MCU(Marvel Cinematic Universe). Let’s go ahead and write an API that returns data on Black Panther characters. Let’s make Shuri proud! Don’t Freeze! 😃

What is Lumen?

Lumen is a stunningly fast PHP micro-framework for building web applications with expressive, elegant syntax. We believe development must be an enjoyable, creative experience to be truly fulfilling. Lumen attempts to take the pain out of development by easing common tasks used in the majority of web projects, such as routing, database abstraction, queueing, and caching. Github

Project Requirements

Lumen, like any other framework, has system requirements that need to be met for a smooth development process and running of the application. Requirements of Lumen include;

  1. PHP ≥ 7.1.3 (including OpenSSL, PDO and Mbstring PHP extensions must be installed)
  2. Composer
  3. A MySQL database(instructions on setup)
  4. A database tool for MySQL(Choose from here) — For managing our MySQL database. I use SequelPro because I am on a Mac.

Getting Started

Let’s dig in. We first pull in the Lumen installer through Composer — a PHP Dependency Manager. If you don’t already have Composer, get it here and install it globally. We then run the following command to install Lumen on our system. Find instructions on setting up Lumen here.

With our Lumen setup complete, we create a new project. The command for creating a new Lumen project is;
lumen new [app name]

In our case, we run:
lumen new black-panther-api

This command sets up a fresh lumen project in a folder called black-panther-api. We cd into the directory:
cd black-panther-api

PS: To be sure all packages are installed, let’s run composer install to repeat the process(pull in packages). Next, we boot up the application with the following command:
php -S localhost:8000 -t public

This serves our application. We can access it by going to http://localhost:8000 in our browser. You should see the version of Lumen installed returned or printed out on your screen. In this case; Lumen (5.6.1) (Laravel Components 5.6.*) -the latest version as of time writing this blog post.

Getting Our Hands Dirty

Great! So far so good. (This is where you take a sip from your cup of coffee). We are going to leverage on Eloquent - Laravel’s sassy ORM and Facades(understand the Facade Design Pattern here). These are ‘deactivated’ by default in Lumen. We ‘activate’ them by uncommenting two lines of code in the bootstrap/app.php file on lines 26 and 28 so we have;

$app->withFacades();

$app->withEloquent();

Let’s change the text returned on hitting the base url(http://localhost:8000) of our application. Open the file web.php in the routes folder. Delete the line that has

return $router->app->version();

replace with;

return 'Black Panther API v1.0.0 - Wakanda Forever!';

Save the file and refresh or load http://localhost:8000 to see changes take effect.

Database — Models and Migrations

Lumen makes connecting to databases and running queries extremely simple. Currently Lumen supports four database systems: MySQL, Postgres, SQLite, and SQL Server.

The Lumen documentation defines, Migrations as follows;

Migrations are like version control for your database, allowing your team to easily modify and share the application’s database schema.Lumen Docs

Models on the other hand, represent knowledge — the underlying, logical structure of data in a software application and the high-level class associated with it. A model could be a single object (rather uninteresting), or it could be some structure of objects. This object model does not contain any information about the user interface.

Let’s create our migration file to create the Characters table:
php artisan make:migration create_characters_table

This command creates a file in the database/migrations directory. All migrations are timestamped and this is how the application keeps track of migrations in order. In my case, 2018_01_24_133302_create_characters_table.php. We open this file in our favorite IDE and then add the attributes of Black Panther characters in there. We want our characters to have the following attributes: id, uuid, name, alias, occupation, gender, place of birth, bio, abilities, played by, image_path which will create corresponding columns in our database.

Our migration file with the above attributes will look like this:

<?php

use Illuminate\Support\Facades\Schema;
use Illuminate\Database\Schema\Blueprint;
use Illuminate\Database\Migrations\Migration;

class CreateCharactersTable extends Migration
{
    /**
     * Run the migrations.
     *
     * @return void
     */
    public function up()
    {
        Schema::create('characters', function (Blueprint $table) {
            $table->increments('id');
            $table->uuid('uuid')->unique(); 
            $table->string('name')->unique();
            $table->string('alias');
            $table->string('occupation');
            $table->string('gender');
            $table->string('place_of_birth');
            $table->text('bio');
            $table->text('abilities');
            $table->string('played_by');
            $table->string('image_path');
        });
    }

    /**
     * Reverse the migrations.
     *
     * @return void
     */
    public function down()
    {
        Schema::dropIfExists('characters');
    }
}

We then run our migration;

php artisan migrate

This creates a characters table together with the columns defined in our database. We should have two tables in our database now; characters and migrations.

Next step is the creation of the model. Create the app/Character.php file and add the following code:

<?php

namespace App;

use Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Model;

class Character extends Model
{
   public $timestamps = false;
   protected $primaryKey = 'uuid';
   /**
    * The attributes that are mass assignable.
    *
    * @var array
    */
   protected $fillable = [
      'uuid', 'name', 'occupation', 'place_of_birth', 'gender', 'abilities', 'played_by', 'image_path', 'bio', 'alias'
   ];

   /**
    * The attributes excluded from the model's JSON form.
    *
    * @var array
    */
   protected $hidden = ['id'];
}

In the above code, we have made the id attribute hidden from the JSON responses returned. You can read on mass assignment here.

Setting Up Cloudinary

Cloudinary is the media management platform for web and mobile developers. It enables users to upload, store, manage, manipulate and deliver images and video for websites and apps, with the goal of improving performance.

Head over to Cloudinary, to sign up for an account. If you already have an account, just sign in. Once done, you get presented with a dashboard like this;

Cloudinary Dashboard
Cloudinary Dashboard

From the dashboard, we are able to see our account details. We are going to need the Cloudinary cloud name, API Key and API secret. These values will be stored in the .env file in the root of the project. Replace ‘**’ with the corresponding values from your Cloudinary dashboard from below.

CLOUDINARY_API_KEY=******************
CLOUDINARY_API_SECRET=******************
CLOUDINARY_CLOUD_NAME=******************

Let’s pull in the Cloudinary package from packagist. We search for Cloudinary and click on cloudinary/cloudinary_php from the list of results. We run the following command pull in the Cloudinary package into our project through Composer.

composer require cloudinary/cloudinary_php

To set Cloudinary configuration values at runtime, we pass an array to the config method in the Cloudinary class. We do this in the bootstrap/app.php file. See below.

Cloudinary::config(array(
   'cloud_name' => env('CLOUDINARY_CLOUD_NAME', true),
   'api_key' => env('CLOUDINARY_API_KEY', true),
   'api_secret' => env('CLOUDINARY_API_SECRET', true)
));

Routing — The Border Tribe

You will define all of the routes for your application in the routes/web.php file. Open this file in your IDE and the code below.

<?php

/*
|--------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Application Routes
|--------------------------------------------------------------------------
|
| Here is where you can register all of the routes for an application.
| It is a breeze. Simply tell Lumen the URIs it should respond to
| and give it the Closure to call when that URI is requested.
|
*/

$router->get('/', function () use ($router) {
   return 'Black Panther v1.0.0 - Wakanda Forever!';
});

$router->group(['prefix' => 'api/v1'], function() use ($router){
   $router->get('characters', 'CharacterController@index');
   $router->post('characters', 'CharacterController@create');
   $router->get('characters/{uuid}', 'CharacterController@show');
   $router->put('characters/{uuid}', 'CharacterController@update');
   $router->delete('characters/{uuid}', 'CharacterController@destroy');
});

From the code in the web.php file, we leverage on routes and the CharacterController(which we will create next). Route groups allow us to share route attributes, such as middleware or namespaces, across a large number of routes without needing to define those attributes on each individual route. Find out more on routes here.

The Controller

Instead of defining all of your request handling logic in a single routes.php file, you may wish to organize this behavior using Controller classes. Controllers can group related HTTP request handling logic into a class. Controllers are stored in the app/Http/Controllers directory.

We create our controller, CharacterController in app/Http/Controllers. We then add the following code:

<?php

namespace App\Http\Controllers;

use App\Character;
use Illuminate\Http\Request;
use Ramsey\Uuid\Uuid;

use Cloudinary\Uploader;

class CharacterController extends Controller
{
   public $timestamps = false;
   /**
    * Create a new controller instance.
    *
    * @return void
    */
   public function __construct()
   {
      //
   }

   public function index(){
      return response()->json(['data' => Character::all()]);
   }

   public function create(Request $request){
      $uuid = Uuid::uuid4();

      $this->validate($request, [
         'name' => 'required|unique:characters',
         'occupation' => 'required',
         'gender' => 'required',
         'place_of_birth' => 'required',
         'played_by' => 'required',
         'image_path' => 'required',
         'bio' => 'required',
      ]);

      $extension = $request->image_path->extension();

      $image = Uploader::upload($request->file('image_path')->getRealPath(), ['public_id' => strtolower($request->input('name'). '.' .$extension), 'folder' => 'black-panther']);

      $character = Character::create(array_merge($request->all(), [ 'uuid' => $uuid->toString(), 'image_path' => $image['secure_url'] ]));

      return response()->json(['data' => $character, 'status' => 201]);
   }

   public function show($uuid){
      $character = Character::where('uuid', $uuid)->firstOrFail();

      return response()->json(['data' => $character ]);
   }

   public function update(Request $request, $uuid){
      $character = Character::where('uuid', $uuid)->firstOrFail();

      $character->update($request->all());

      return response()->json(['data' => $character, 'status' => 200]);
   }

   public function destroy($uuid){
      Character::where('uuid', $uuid)->firstOrFail()->delete();

      return response('Character Squashed', 200);
   }
}

These methods list, create, show, update and destroy/delete a resource.

  • The index method handles a GET request to the characters endpoint and returns all Black Panther characters resources in the database.

  • The create method handles a POST request to the characters endpoint and creates a new character resource. We also upload the character’s avatar to the cloud(Cloudinary servers) programmatically using their API. On successful upload, an object with information on file is returned and is stored in image_path variable. You can find out more in the official documentation. We store the path(secure url) to the avatar in our database.

  • The show method also handles a GET request to the characters endpoint with a specified resource. Eg. /characters/10a870d8-bdb9–4856–8866-c491008fd921 and returns the resource with the uuid specified.

  • The update method checks if a specified character resource exists and allows the resource to be updated. This method handles a PUT request to the characters endpoint and updates specified resource. Eg. /characters/10a870d8-bdb9–4856–8866-c491008fd921

  • The destroy method also checks if a specified resource characters resource exists and then deletes it from the database. This method handles a DELETE request to the characters endpoint with a character resource specified.

We realize from our routes file(web.php), that the HTTP request being sent to a particular endpoint, determines which controller action/method is invoked. Looking through the code, we import or require the Character model and the UUID class via:

use App\Author;
use Ramsey\Uuid\Uuid;

In the controller, all methods return data in the JSON format.

Testing [Manual]

We cab test our API using REST clients(I recommend either Insomnia or PostMan). Check out various documentations on testing using either tool.

Conclusion

We did it! We successfully wrote a REST API listing characters in Black Panther using Lumen(super-cool micro-framework) and Cloudinary. Lumen is my go-to tool for APIs using PHP. I hope you get to enjoy using it as much as I do. You can find the source for this project on github. Cheers!

Please let me know if you have any questions, observations or criticisms in the comment section. Feedback is always welcome.

Share: Twitter Facebook
Peter Sowah's Picture

About Peter Sowah

Problem Solver, Programmer, Gamer

Accra, Ghana https://petersowah.dev

Comments