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Link: A fast and simple PHP Router (github.com)

47 points by apsdehal ↗ HN
Link supports RESTful routes and helps you create clean Web apps and APIs through its various features like Named Routes. Its an effort to combine good parts of various php router, like toro's method of parsing routes, laravel's named routes, others middleware etc. so much.

60 comments

[ 460 ms ] story [ 4695 ms ] thread
alphadevx
Nice work! A micro-micro-framework, makes Slim and Silex look big.
arenaninja
It is nice, but having implemented something like this myself at work recently, this looks eerily familiar and some things about it bug me.

For example, why is ReflectionClass not used (I'm guessing PHP 4 compatibility)? Particularly because class_exists can cause major headaches if you use the default autoloader, see https://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=52339

There's also little information available from outside the router; an invalid class/method uses die without giving you an option to check for it and handle it some other way. I also don't immediately see any special handling for not allowing magical methods to be called

Definitely a good start for personal projects though, just needs some spit and polish

apsdehal
Thanks for your concern, I would try to implement features you have said, Its still under development mode and needs much polish.
arenaninja
Good luck! Another feature of my router is that the method name converts snake_case to camelCase, so that resource/list_actions calls ResourceController::listActions(), but some of the features I mention will most likely incur a performance hit, but it shouldn't be significant once opcache comes into play
leeoniya
there are so many php routers these days that any "fast" claims should probably be accompanied by benchmarks.

routing is a fairly uncomplicated task and the speed difference will only become apparent at really high loads.

http://c9s.github.io/Pux/

http://auraphp.com/packages/Aura.Router/

http://zaphpa.org/

http://toroweb.org/

https://github.com/dannyvankooten/PHP-Router

https://github.com/symfony/Routing

http://docs.phalconphp.com/en/latest/api/Phalcon_Mvc_Router....

nubs
This list is missing https://github.com/nikic/FastRoute which is definitely worth looking at.
Nickoladze
Dont forget µ which is totally a legit router

https://github.com/lastguest/mu

insky
Which begs the question, how on earth do you choose one?

Edit: as in, which router do you pick and how do you pick one? Choice can lead to decision paralysis.

apsdehal
Check whats your need, if you are building up much bigger apps go for a fully fledged framework, rest for small apps you can use microrouters , according to your need, each has its own unique features.
icedchai
For small apps, you don't need a "router", period. Routing is done by the file system and placing .php files in directories!
krapp
One of the benefits of using a url router is access control - you could have a problem with just letting every file be executable by url, especially if you happen to have a remote file inclusion issue anywhere. With a router you know explicitly what can get invoked and what can't.

Although, doing it without a router is probably always going to be faster.

insky
A late trick I discovered, was that you can configure your php instance to inclued a file with every script. For example the following can be added to .htaccess:

  php_value auto_prepend_file 'before.php'
You can then use that for bootstrapping, front controller and to limit access. Can be a bit clumsy, but it's nicely divorced from simple page controllers.
icedchai
neat! this beats putting an include at the top of each file...
krapp
It certainly does.

I personally would still prefer a router but I know of a project which was written almost entirely in sprawling, procedural PHP that might benefit from this. Although I do wonder what the performance hit would be.

leeoniya
the fact that it uses the magic __callStatic probably means it's out of the running for "fastest"
ams6110
I used Epiphany last time I needed something like this. https://github.com/jmathai/epiphany

Note that is more than a router, it's a microframework.

krapp
What would you want a 'minimally viable' microframework to include, in terms of functionality?

This has come up a couple of times in PHP framework and router threads, and i've been wondering what it would look like (it would probably be even smaller than Slim Framework). I've gotten as far as including Composer and a rather barebones router and telling people to just include whatever else they want but I suspect other people would want more.

I find it annoying when frameworks include dependencies I don't want, particularly an ORM or a templating engine, but I understand for a lot of people, that's the point (not having to pick dependencies themselves.)

127001brewer
Why would you want to use any PHP router instead of writing the rewrite rules within an Apache VirtualHost file or a .htaccess file?
RobAley
At a guess because you don't use apache, you don't have .htaccess / conf permissions, you are going to distribute your script and can't rely on the above, your router uses database or other external sources, you want to be like the cool kids, or because you want to, it works, and why not?
127001brewer
Let's say you are using Apache (so maybe that already means you're not one of the cool kids?), then why would you use any of the available PHP routers?

Overall, I'm not trying to discount anyone's work with developing PHP routers, but I'd like to understand the benefits of using them.

bartonfink
It would help decouple your application code and structure from Apache configuration and the need to be familiar with Apache configuration syntax and nuance. Your Apache config would just need to route all requests to your app root to one routing file, which is pretty simple, and then the routing file can process from there. You'd also have the benefits of more configurable routing, if you needed that (e.g. routing based on specific parameters in a POST instead of just based on the request url and method).
Nickoladze
I would prefer to have all my behavior be in my codebase.

Also, restarting Apache after adding a route would get tedious during development.

insky
I guess you are asking why not just use the filesystem one-one like mapping url to file?

A benefit of routing is that you can have a single point of contact in your app: a front controller. And you can place your route config in one place.

This router also has RESTful routing, detecting HTTP methods upfront that correspond to a predictable method name in a named class.

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vectorpush
Separation of concerns? Why would I ever want to implement business logic in an http server configuration file?
mjburgess
Umm.. what do you think a server is for?
vectorpush
The http server's job is to translate URLs into http requests for consumption by the application. The http server should generally be agnostic regarding the semantic meaning of your URLs, which take the form of business rules, the proper place for which is the application layer (whenever possible).
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johnnymonster
Do you have experience with massive http conf files? They become very hard to maintain! There is always going to be tradeoffs between maintainability, speed and ease of use. It just depends what sort of application you are running.
jamesmoss
Meh, another PHP library using lengthy static methods making it impossible to extend.
andrewryno
Yeah I don't understand the use of statics here. I'm going to guess it's just so they can use the "nicer" syntax without having to instantiate a new object, which would honestly make more sense to me. That way you can inject a Link instance into your controller/views and just call `$link->route('namedRoute')`.
insky
It looks tidier with the global.
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insky
How does this compare with something like Slim?

+1 for being lightweight and readable.

darkstar999
Slim is a whole (micro)frameork that includes routing. This is just a request router.
darkstar999
No tests?
apsdehal
Its under development, much to be added. Thanks for your concern.
pearjuice
It's written in PHP.
ceejayoz
Which is readily unit tested.
nawariata
Your nick should read prejudice.
darkstar999
Yes because no other PHP projects have perfectly good unit tests. /s
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mcfunley
FWIW at Etsy I built and subsequently helped completely dismantle a minimal PHP routing framework. We just used .htaccess and php files.

PHP/Apache affords you a fast, simple alternative, and what you gain with a framework (route lookup for an object) just isn't compelling enough IMO to justify the added overhead and complexity.

I think the endless proliferation of PHP microrouters (including mine, RIP) is people porting Django and Rails features to PHP without applying critical thinking first. (Myself included.)

127001brewer
How complicated were the Etsy routes? And were the added overhead and complexity?

And I know it is a pain to restart Apache each time there's a change to the configuration file, but does anyone know the time differences between a PHP router and Apache rewrites?

icedchai
Put it in .htaccess. No restarts needed.
127001brewer
That's correct - I was thinking of using an Apache VirtualHost file. (Isn't using the .htaccess file slower(?) than using the VirtualHost file?)
icedchai
It is slower, since .htaccess is parsed on every request. (However, it is probably faster than routing through PHP code.)
rdam
You can reload Apache without a restart (apache2/httpd graceful/reload depending on your distro).
mcfunley
Basically just "/listing/<a number>/<some ignored text> goes to listing.php", multiplied by a thousand pages or so.

There's overhead associated with doing the bookkeeping necessary to compute the route lookups. In practice, it's not that awful to just write a function like "get_url($listing_id)" by hand, and debugging this later is much more straightforward.

We didn't need to restart httpd (in development at least) to add to .htaccess. For production deploys maybe we were configured to do this, but that's hidden from development.

yowmamasita
then I think what would be best here is a command line tool to manage your routes on .htaccess or nginx configs.
pothibo
Is it a PHP thing to indent with tabs rather than 2 spaces? Genuinely curious.
uses
The community-organized PSR-2 standard [1], used by every major framework and open-source package, states:

> Code MUST use 4 spaces for indenting, not tabs

[1] http://www.php-fig.org/psr/psr-2/