Contents

• Part 1: Installation
• Part 2: Orientation
• Part 3: Installing External Libraries
• Part 4: Managing Databases

As a fan of CodeIgniter, I was very pleased when the Sparks project came on the scene, offering a relatively easy way to integrate third-party libraries/classes into your project. Laravel has a similar and arguably more feature-rich analog in Bundles. With a bit of luck, the third-party library you require has already been converted to a Laravel bundle, making installation a snip.

Let’s say, for example, we’re going to build a web-scraping application. The first two libraries I’d consider adding to the project would be the Requests HTTP library and the PHP Simple HTML DOM Parser.

From an SSH login, at the root of your project, issue the following command:

php artisan bundle:install requests phpsimplehtmldom

You should be greeted with the following results:

Fetching [requests]...done! Bundle installed.
Fetching [phpsimplehtmldom]...done! Bundle installed.


The file application/bundles.php will probably contain code along the following lines:

<?php

/*
 &#91;...various comments...&#93;
*/

return array(

	'docs' => array('handles' => 'docs'),

);

Register the new libraries like this:

return array(

	'docs' => array('handles' => 'docs'),
	'requests' => array('auto' => TRUE),
	'phpsimplehtmldom' => array('auto' => TRUE),

);

And use like this:

		$HDM = IoC::resolve('HtmlDomParser'); // Give us a hook into the library; Requests doesn't need this

		// Request the HTML page
		//$headers = array('Accept' => 'application/html');
		$headers = array();
		//$options = array('auth' => array('user', 'pass'));
		$options = array();
		$request = Requests::get('http://some.domain/some/page', $headers, $options);
		if($request->status_code != 200) {
			// Handle error retrieving page
		}

		$dom = $HDM::str_get_html($request->body);

		// Options
		$options = $dom->find('#somediv option');
		foreach($options as $option) {
			echo $option->value.' | '.$option->innertext."<br />";
		}

There’s a lot more to this IoC thing than meets the eye. To be frank, it’s above my head. I’m also not convinced I fully understand registering bundles. But, like CodeIgniter, learning is a process of immersion in the framework. I’m pretty sure than in a couple of years I’ll laugh at the code above. So all I ask is please be gentle in the comments. 😉

Library image copyright © Janne Moren, licensed under Creative Commons. Used with permission.