Pluto

The open source software development course's repository.

It lies on the same basis as Mars to prepare its development.

Set up development environment

For OS X, Valet gives a pretty smooth experience. Easy to download, easy to configure.

For Windows and Linux we will use Laravel Homestead for local development. With Homestead, the web server is hosted from a virtual machine with the help of VirtualBox and Vagrant.

1. If you haven't already, download and install Git, GitHub Desktop, VirtualBox, and Vagrant.

2. Recommended: create a new folder named "Git" for your git projects.

3. Clone (~Download) the Pluto repository. You can easily do this with Github Desktop. If you can not find this option there, clicking on the green Code button on the GitHub webpage and selecting Open with GitHub Desktop will do the job. Or you can use the command line too to clone the directory (see point 5.).

4. Open a terminal and navigate to your git folder. (If you are not familiar with the command line, watch some YouTube tutorial about the terminal basics.)

5. Run git clone https://github.com/laravel/homestead.git to clone Homestead. This will create a folder named Homestead in your git folder. We will refer this as your "Homestead directory".

6. Navigate to your Homestead directory: cd Homestead.

7. Run bash init.sh on macOs/Linux or init.bat on Windows to create the Homestead.yaml configuration file.

8. The only essential thing to set in this file is to set the path to your project. For example:

folders:
    -   map: C:\Users\domi\Documents\GitHub\pluto
        to: /home/vagrant/code

The above line will map the folder C:\Users\domi\Documents\GitHub\pluto to the folder /home/vagrant/code in your Homestead virtal machine.

9. You will need to create ssh keys to connect to the Homestead VM. Run ssh-keygen -t rsa -b 4096 -C "[email protected]" to generate the keys (if the system can not find this command, try running it in Git Bash - this program should have been installed with git.) If the prompt says Enter file in which to save the key... just press enter to create the file in the default location, then enter a passphrase (~password, but we won't need to remember it).

10. In your Homestead directory, run vagrant up. This will create a virtual machine with the Homestead configuration. If no error messages appear, run vagrant ssh to connect to the virtual machine. You will find yourself in the /home/vagrant directory in the VM. Here everything is installed and set up for you, including php, mysql, composer, etc.

11. Navigate to your project folder (cd code). We will be working from here from now on.

12. Run composer install to install the laravel dependencies.

13. Run cp .env.example .env to copy/create the .env file. This is the file that contains the environment variables, therefore it is not synced with git. You can add your own passwords and other sensitive information to this file. Fill in the DEVELOPER_NAME and DEVELOPER_EMAIL variables to use your custom login credentials.

14. Run php artisan key:generate to generate the application key in .env. This is used for security purposes.

15. Run php artisan migrate:fresh --seed. This will create the database tables (migrating) and fill them with the default data (seeding). fresh indicates to drop the existing tables first, if you had some - this will be useful later.

16. Now you should be able to access the website by entering 192.168.10.10 in your browser. Log in with [email protected] (or your custom email set in .env) and asdasdasd as password.

17. Congrats, you can start coding! You changes will be synced automatically and you can test it in the browser.

Notes:

• As you can see, Laravel's commands are look like php artisan ~:~ --options. Get used to it. To create a new file, it is recommended to use php artisan make:model ModelName for example (also: controller, migration, etc.)
• For more configuartion options (eg. use custom website names instead of 192.168.10.10), look at the Homestead documentation.
• To shut down the Homestead VM, run vagrant halt.
• Most of the above setup is a one-time thing to do. However, whenever you start working, you might need to run vagrant up and vagrant ssh to start the virtual machine. If you create migrations or you want to reset the database, run php artisan migrate:fresh --seed.

Beginner guide

The basic things you will need as a beginner:

• Controllers: app/Http/Controllers - the main functionalities of the backend
• Database:
  • Migrations: database/migrations - the database structure can be modified with migrations
  • Seeders: database/seeders, database/factories - the database can be seeded with dummy data which are set in factories
  • Read the documentation of queries to understand how to insert/update/delete data in the database. Laravel also has particular functions for inserting and updating models. The queries will mostly return Collections, which are similar to arrays but with custom functions.
• Models: app/Models - the database is mapped to php classes using Models (ORM - Object Relational Mapping). Models are the main way to interact with the database. To create Models, use php artisan make:model ModelName -a to generate the model and a corresponding controller, factory, etc. Also take a look at Relationships to define relations between Models.
• Routes: routes/web - to map the requests from the browser to controller functions
• Frontend: resources/views - the webpage is generated from these blade files. To return a webpage, use return view('path.to.view', ['additional_data' => $data, ...]);. Blade files are html codes with additional php functionalities: loops, variables, etc. Writing {{ something }} is equivalent to php's print: echo something;. When writing forms, add @csrf to the form for security reasons (without it, the request will not work). Blade files can also be nested, included, etc (eg. @include('path.to.file'))). Our front-end framework is Materialize.
• Language files: resources/lang - to translate the webpage. Use __('filename.key') in the backend and @lang('filename.key') in blades. To add variables: __('filename.key', ['variable' => 'value']), prefix the variable name with : in the language files.
• Validation: It is recommended to validate every user input: for example, in the controller: $request->validate(['title' => 'required|string|max:255']);. Available validation rules.
• Debugging: log files: storage/logs/laravel.log - use Log::info('something happened', ['additional_data' => $data]) to log (also: error, warning, etc.). Alternatively, in the controllers, you can type return response()->json(...); to print some thing in the browser. In blades, type {{ var_dump($data) }} to display some data. It is worth to take a look at the query debugging options also.

Official documentations

• Laravel
• Materialize