API Platform up and running in 5 minutes 🚀

API Platform is a framework for API-first projects, built on top of Symfony components. Let's see how to create a minimal and lightweight starter project in just 5 minutes!

The only requirements are Docker Desktop, Visual Studio Code with the Dev Containers extension installed.

Setup

Download Symfony Sail (disclaimer, I'm the author 😊) which provides a ready-to-go developement environment for Symfony.

1. Extract the zip in a directory api-platform-playground
2. Create an empty .env.local in that folder
3. Start Visual Studio Code, type F1 and choose Dev Containers: Reopen in Container

From now on, every command must be run inside Visual Studio Code built-in terminal, that is inside the container itself.

Let's download and install Symfony skeleton:

curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/symfony/skeleton/6.2/composer.json
composer install

We need to add two required libraries in order to be able to navigate API Platform documentation:

composer require symfony/asset symfony/twig-pack

And finally the API Platform package:

composer require api-platform/core

Your API documentation is available at http://localhost/api/docs 🎉🎉🎉

Your first resource

Time to add the first resource! We want to validate the input data and persist our resource. And being lazy, we take the advantage of MakerBundle also:

Do not execute the Docker recipe as we already have Docker configuration!

composer require symfony/validator symfony/orm-pack symfony/maker-bundle

Wait a moment, what about the database? Thanks to Symfony Sail, we already have a running database instance as db:3306. Let's set the DATABASE_URL in the .env.local file:

DATABASE_URL="mysql://root:@db:3306/db_name?serverVersion=10.11.2-MariaDB&charset=utf8mb4"

Now we can finally generate our first resource named BlogPost:

php bin/console make:entity BlogPost --api-resource

Using the wizard, add a required title property of 64 character length, then modify App\Entity\BlogPost as follows:

<?php

namespace App\Entity;

// ...
use Symfony\Component\Validator\Constraints as Assert;

// ...
class BlogPost
{
    // ...

    // ...
    #[Assert\NotBlank]
    #[Assert\Length(max: 64)]
    private ?string $title = null;
}

Almost done! Generate a migration and execute it:

php bin/console doctrine:migrations:diff
php bin/console doctrine:migrations:migrate -n

Finish! 😉

Test a simple POST request using the API Platform page at http://localhost/api/docs, with a simple payload like { title: "My first blog post!" }.

Bonus: static analysis with PHPStan and formatting upon saving using PHP_CodeSniffer? 🤓

Easy:

Do install the recipes of these libraries.

composer require --dev phpstan/phpstan squizlabs/php_codesniffer