A very short while ago I mentioned a Dump and Die function that I add in to little home baked projects. I stand by this. It's fun to have made my own. However, there is one thing that I realise I don't want to do from scratch anymore... sometimes it's don't always do it yourself.
For my little website build I made my own router, but I have five controllers, and the 404 page doesn't work properly, so I'm keeping my half baked router in this one, but I sat down to refactor a little 221b helper app I'm playing with, and realised, pretty quickly, that I don't have the energy to make the router for it.
Cue... head over to Packagist and see what I can find.
I find the very mature and pretty standard Symfony Routing package. This is familiar and gets to work easily. Closely followed by the Illuminate offering and the Laravel Framework. They are both pretty robust, and have so much development time in them. I'm beginning to realise why it's so rarely worth building anything from the ground up, and I've not even started with authentication.
For now, they are a step too far. I still want these playground projects to feel a bit more homebrew.
But I found a great little router created by Danny Van Kooten - I don't know much about Danny, other than he runs ibericode, the website tells me it is a tiny company from The Netherlands. I also now know the guy is much better at making routers than me.
You can find his router on Packagist. It's superb. If you're running Composer it's installed / required with composer require altorouter/altorouter or add it manually to a composer.json like so:
"require": {
"altorouter/altorouter": "^2.0"
}
Tinker around with your entry point in some way (for me, editing index.php in the public folder) and you're pretty much good to go. From the complexity of Symfony looking vaguely like this...
$routes->add('cluebook', new Route(constant('URL_SUBFOLDER')
. '/cluebook/{id}', array('controller'=>'ClueController',
'method'=>'showAction'),
array('id'=>'[0-9]+')));
... and the naivety of IAmAlsoRouter (not a real thing) being a routes array and a lot of faffing around in a Router class, I have ended up with something along the lines of this...
$router->map( 'GET', '/cluebook/[i:id]/', 'ClueController#showAction' );
It takes a method, a route, target and a name, and after that it works the magic. It is, as the documentation states, lightweight and flexible.
Thanks Danny!