Get Started

This comprehensive guide explains how to get your first endpoint up and running and do cool stuff. Assuming you have Reflect installed and ready to go, let's dive in!

The endpoint

1. It starts with a folder

   Create a folder called endpoints in the root of your reflect installation. This is where your code resides.

   $ mkdir endpoints
   

2. Public folder

   Then create another folder inside endpoints called public. This will contain all entry points for your endpoints.

   $ mkdir public
   

   You can also cd into this directory if you want, as all of the remaining steps of this guide will concern stuff inside this folder.

3. Create endpoint

   Reflect uses the file structure in the endpoints folder to determine what is an endpoint and what is not. So, for example, to expose an endpoint called /ping you would create a folder called ping here.

   $ mkdir endpoints/public/ping
   

4. Create a PHP file for your endpoint logic

   To make your endpoint do more than nothing, create a .php file with the same name as your endpoint except with the first letter Capitalized.

   $ touch endpoints/public/ping/Ping.php
   

   This file is now the "default" endpoint of /ping. If you were to create another file called for example Foo.php inside this folder, that would become a second-level endpoint reached via /ping/foo.

   Some examples:

   endpoints/public/ping/Ping.php     ==>  https://example.com/ping
   endpoints/public/ping/Foo.php      ==>  https://example.com/ping/foo
   endpoints/public/ping/bar/Baz.php  ==>  https://example.com/ping/bar/baz
   endpoints/public/ping/bar/Qux.php  ==>  https://example.com/ping/bar/qux
   

5. File contents

   So here is where it all begins. Reflect tries to keep the religious framework-specific syntax to a minimum, but say it with me "stdout and stderr". These are the two methods you should remember (inspired by standard streams). You use these two to send a response back to the client, whether they're connected via HTTP or socket.

   <?php
   
       require_once Path::api();
   
       // The name of the class should be the endpoint path as PascalCase.
       // So for "/ping" the name is "Ping". If the endpoint was "/ping/foo" the class name would be "PingFoo" etc.
       class Ping extends API {
           public function __construct() {
               // Initialize the parent with the HTTP Content-Type you wish the response to be in.
               // See https://github.com/viwes/reflect/wiki/Supported-technologies#response-content-types for list of available types.
               parent::__construct(ContentType::JSON);
           }
           
           // Accept REST method by creating a "_<HTTP_METHOD>" public method.
           // It gets called automagically when the endpoint gets a request.
           public function _GET() {
               return $this->stdout("pong");
           }
       }

   That's it to get a basic endpoint's logic defined. You can do whatever you want in these _<HTTP_METHOD> class methods!

Now that we've come all the way down here, let's dive further into authentication abyss. 🤿

The authentication

You can use the Reflect admin CLI to manage endpoints, users, keys and permissions. Read more on the Authentication page