Libraries

Libraries are a collection of classes bundled together in one package to serve a purpose or to provide extended functionality to your application. They can be either written by yourself, or by someone else.

The Framework provides a directory, app/Library/ and a namespace \App\Library, for you to store those libraries. You can also use the :ref:`Composer <https://getcomposer.org/>`_ tool to install 3rd party libraries, and they will by default be installed into the vendor/ directory.

Registering libraries

How you will use the installed or written library is up to you, but we recommend you expose it to the application as a service. To do so, you need to write a service provider class. To write a service provider save it to the app/Provider/ directory and give it the namespace of \App\Provider, in our example we will create a MyProvider.php file in the above example:

<?php
namespace App\Provider;

use Pimple\Container as App;

class MyProvider implements \Pimple\ServiceProviderInterface
{
    public function register(App $app)
    {
    }
}

The basic service provider class layout is set, but it is not yet registered with the Framework. To do so, add the full class name to the providerList configuration item in app/Config/provider.php configuration file:

<?php
// ...
$configuration["providerList"] = [
    \App\Provider\MyProvider::class
];
// ...

All there is to it now, is to expose the library to the application as service. To do so, give it a unique name, in this example we use mylibrary.service as the service name for the example library. To expose it, we add a initialisation function to the $app variable in the register method in the provider class:

<?php
// ...
    public function register(App $app)
    {
        $app["mylibrary.service"] = function(App $app) {
            return new \App\Library\MyLibrary;
        };
    }
// ...

As seen above, the initialisation function retrieves the Application object as input. The initialisation function must return the library object at the end, as this object will be retrieved by the caller later. To use the library, you call it as any other service wherever you need it in the application:

<?php
// ...
$library = $application["mylibrary.service"];
// ...

For more information on registering services and service providers, please refer to the Pimple Dependency Injection Container Documentation.