Mini-Blog

This is a mini-blog that shows the posts which are posted by the admin or any user that has an account. As a visitor one can see all the published posts. Anyone can sign up and make their own post. The posts can be only created but can not be updated or deleted.

In addition, the admin can import posts from a different URL. For that, he needs to go with some procedures. The posts are being cached by the system for a certain period of time. After that, it will be cleared until the new cache is not stored. For caching Redis has been used which is a very popular in-memory database.

Project Setup

setup composer

After cloning the project, go to the project directory and open the terminal and hit

composer install --no-dev

This command will install all the dependencies for the project skipping the dev dependencies. If you want to the dev dependencies to be installed ignore --no-dev and simply hit composer install

Then add a .env file in the root of the project directory and copy the .env.example contents or you may copy the .env.example file and paste in the root directory and rename it to .env

Next, you should fill up the APP_KEY in the .env file with a long random string, or you hit the command below

php artisan key:generate

setup database

You need to fill up the database credentials in the .env file. Create a database according to your connection. The following fields need to fill up in the .env file

DB_CONNECTION=
DB_HOST=
DB_PORT=
DB_DATABASE=
DB_USERNAME=
DB_PASSWORD=

Setup cache driver

As we are using Redis we need to tell our system to use redis as our cache and queue driver. For that fill the following fields in your .env file

CACHE_DRIVER=redis

QUEUE_CONNECTION=redis

Optionally you can set your own prefix for caching. For that, you need to fill

CACHE_PREFIX=

Next, we need to set up the Redis client credentials. We will be using the predis/predis package.

REDIS_CLIENT=predis
REDIS_HOST=127.0.0.1
REDIS_PASSWORD=null
REDIS_PORT=6379

Prerequisite setup to import post from other site/blog

In order to import data from other sites/blogs, an IMPORT_URL key needs to be present in the .env file with a valid URL of the site from which the data is to be fetched.

IMPORT_URL=

Optionally if you want to get notified after data import fill up the following fields (for test purposes fill up those fields with mailtrap credential)

MAIL_MAILER=smtp
MAIL_HOST=mailhog
MAIL_PORT=1025
MAIL_USERNAME=null
MAIL_PASSWORD=null
MAIL_ENCRYPTION=null
MAIL_FROM_ADDRESS=null
MAIL_FROM_NAME="${APP_NAME}"

NOTIFY_ADMIN=true # false for not sending notification

Next you need to set admin's info

ADMIN_NAME=
ADMIN_EMAIL=

Database migrations & queue worker

Now it's time for migrating. Hit the command below

php artisan migrate

An 'admin' is needed by default for the system. To generate an admin, simply hit the command below

php artisan db:seed

You can combine the migrate and seed command in one by following

php artisan migrate --seed

A queue worker is needed to run the queue in the background. For that hit the following command

php artisan queue:work

Running the test cases

Before running test cases you need to configure your IDE and set the interpreter to run phpunit. Additionaly you should have setup something like this in the phpunit.xml file.

<php>
<server name="APP_ENV" value="testing"/>
<server name="BCRYPT_ROUNDS" value="4"/>
<server name="CACHE_DRIVER" value="array"/>
<server name="DB_CONNECTION" value="sqlite"/>
<server name="DB_DATABASE" value=":memory:"/>
<server name="MAIL_MAILER" value="array"/>
<server name="QUEUE_CONNECTION" value="sync"/>
<server name="SESSION_DRIVER" value="array"/>
<server name="TELESCOPE_ENABLED" value="false"/>
</php>

If all goes well, you can run your test suite simply by hitting the command below

php artisan test

Console command to import post from other site

To import post from another blog you have two options. You can log in as an admin and click the 'Import Post' button in the top right corner of your panel. Then it will redirect you to your home page and the posts will be fetched in the background.

Or you can simply hit the command below to import post

php artisan import:posts

This command optionally takes two parameters. First one is the url from where data will be fetched. Secondly the user id, against whom the fetched post will be saved. Both are optional. If no url is provided, the url will be taken from the IMPORT_URL key in .env file. And in case the user id is not provided, the posts will be saved against the default admin.

N.B: This command is a helper command for site admin. User has nothing to do with it.

Running the application

Before running the application you need to install the node modules in your project. Hit the following commands to install them

npm install && npm run dev

You're ready to go. Serve the application and visit it at the url provided in the terminal.

php artisan serve

For better performance you can cache the route and config and dump the auto-loads by the following commands

php artisan config:cache
php artisan route:cache
php artisan optimize --force
composer dumpautoload -o
npm run production