Laravel Swagger Integration for API and Code Documentation

I know, I know, all developers hate documentation. Even I also don't like it but it's an industry practice and we have to follow this. In this blog I am going to explain how you can integrate swagger most popular framework for API with Laravel for creating API docs. Swagger is an incredible way to easily document and test your APIs. So here is the step by step guides.

1) Go to your laravel project on Terminal and include Swagger PHP package with composer.

composer require zircote/swagger-php

This will install swagger php package to laravel and will update your vendor folder. Now we have to create documentation.

2) There is standard syntax for creating docs with swagger. For each API functions and classes you have to add swagger config and config have all the standard keys to define what kind of information you will include in docs. You can check this on following URL.

http://bfanger.github.io/swagger-explained/#/infoObject

Hover mouse on left side object and it will give you information on right side.

This you have to add in add in your controllers and models in your laravel project. So lets define some basic info. For example see following swagger config we have added. This we have added a comments to top of the controller function.

@SWG\Swagger(

     *     basePath="",

     *     schemes={"http"},

     *     @SWG\Info(

     *         version="1.0",

     *         title="Sample API",

     *         @SWG\Contact(name="Hiren Dave", email="hdave10@gmail.com"),

     *     ),

     *   @SWG\Get(

     *     path="/",

     *     description="Returns basic information",

     *     produces={"application/json"},

     *     @SWG\Response(

     *         response=200,

     *         description="Application Overview"

     *     )

     *   )

     * )

And following is my API function.

        public function index()

{

              return Response::json(array('success'=>false,'message'=>'This is Basic Info of API'));

}

It have basic info like API info and API path and output information.

3) Build Swagger Docs.

Go to your laravel project in terminal and run following command.

./vendor/bin/swagger ./app/Http

It will generate swagger.json file in your root folder with all the swagger config you have added in your controller. 

4) Add swagger UI to project to show this docs.

Go to following link to download swagger UI.

https://github.com/swagger-api/swagger-ui

Download it and copy all the files from dist folder to your public/docs folder. Now open public/docs/index.html page and update path of your swagger.json file in following code.

if (url && url.length > 1) {

        url = decodeURIComponent(url[1]);

      } else {

        url = "http://petstore.swagger.io/v2/swagger.json";

      }

Change URL to url your own swagger.json URL, for example in my case it was http://localhost/laravel-swagger/swagger.json

5) Read the Docs. Now go to public docs folder. In my case URL was

http://localhost/laravel-swagger/public/docs/index.html

When you run, you will see following output page.

That's it and you have your API docs minimum efforts. Hope this helps you.

Laravel Add Date Text in PNG and JPEG Image

In our recent project we have a requirement to add date as text in all the uploaded image. For example, check below image.

In this blog I am going to explain how you can do this.

First of open image from the path.

$publicPath = public_path();

$imagePath = $publicPath."/image/myImage.png"; //replace it with your own path

Create a date text.

$text = date('d-m-Y');

Setup font

$font = $publicPath."/fonts/RobotoCondensed-Bold.ttf"; //replace it with your own path

Now while working on this I faced two issues

1) PHP GD functions like imagecreatefrompng was not woking.

2) PNG image was having JPEG mime type.

To resolve first issue, first check your phpinfo(). It should have PNG support enabled.

If it's not enabled, enable it.

To solve second issue check mime type of image with file info function and use respective function to get image resources.

$finfo = finfo_open(FILEINFO_MIME_TYPE);

$mime = finfo_file($finfo, $imagePath);

$image = null;

     

if($mime == "image/png"){

            $image = imagecreatefrompng($imagePath);

        

}else{

            $image = imagecreatefromjpeg($imagePath);       

}

Now we have image resource, we have to add text in image and save image.

$black = imagecolorallocate($image, 0, 0, 0);

imagettftext($image, 20, -45, 600, 20, $black, $font, $text);

imagepng($image,$imagePath);

imagedestroy($image);

That's it. Please note in my case all the images were of fixed width and height so I gave fix X = 600 and y = 20 coordinate for text. If you have variable width and height calculate it dynamically.

Hope this helps you.

Laravel Share Some Variable with All Views

Hello,

Recently in one of my laravel project we have a requirement create side menu in app with some dynamic stats numbers like

Users   (12)
Managers  (10)
Questions  (25)

This menu is included in all the views and to set dynamic values in that we have to share this numbers globally. In this blog I am going to mention how to so this.

1) Create a BaseController class and extend it with controller and add a constructor.

class BaseController extends Controller {
       public function __construct() {
     
       }
}

2) Inside that constructor get all the numbers and share it with view

$users = DB::table('users')->count();
$managers = DB::table('managers')->count();
$questions = DB::table('questions')->count();

View::share('users',$users);
View::share('managers',$managers);
View::share('questions',$questions);

after adding this code your base controller should look like following.

class BaseController extends Controller {
       public function __construct() {
             $users = DB::table('users')->count();
             $managers = DB::table('managers')->count();
             $questions = DB::table('questions')->count();

            View::share('users',$users);
            View::share('managers',$managers);
            View::share('questions',$questions);
       }
}


3) Now extend this base controller to all other controllers.

class MyConttoller extends BaseController {

}

That's it now any view which you render from controller will have those variables by default. Now you just have to use those variables in views.

<ul>
       <li> Users  ({{$users}}) <li/>
       <li> Managers  ({{$managers}}) <li/>
       <li> Questions  ({{$questions}}) <li/>
<ul/>

Hope this helps you.