laratt-api (Laravel Table Tenancy API)

A rest-ful API supporting multi-tenant dynamic table manipulations

This is an API built on top of the laratt library. Demo: https://laratt.niiknow.org/api/documentation X-API-Key: demo123

Use-case/useful:

• Multitenancy is usually related to some kind of a Software as a Service (SaaS) app.
• Headless CMS
• Headless Profile management
• Headless Ecommerce or anything else
• Stashing of logs
• Email subscribers list
• Email bounce/blacklist
• Products API

This API give you the ability to quickly import hundred-of-thousands of rows. Deploy this somewhere, use X-API-Key header for private access, and let this API handle your database access. Think of this as a Serverless/Headless kind of database endpoint. Let this library worry about handling of your data. Otherwise, just use the laratt library in your own app. This library is a demonstration of the laratt library.

Table of Contents

1. Requirements
2. Installation
3. Configuration
4. API
5. Futures
6. Q and A
7. Docker

Requirements

• PHP 7.1+
• Composer
• Node JS
• NPM
• Laravel Valet (NGINX) or Homestead
• PHP xdebug for phpunit code coverage

Installation

1. git clone https://github.com/niiknow/laratt-api
2. cd laratt-api
3. composer install
4. npm install
5. set your .env by copying from .env.example
6. php artisan key:generate and php artisan migrate:fresh --seed
7. Run/Serve the Site
   • laravel valet: valet link laratt
   • homestead: homestead up
8. after valet link laratt, visit laratt.test/ or npm run watch

Production Deployment

1. Package the project

composer app:package

2. Upload the resulting file in storage/build/dist.tar.gz to your server and unpack/extract.
3. Create the necessary database on your server and take note of the database credentials.
4. Visit your-api.example.com/init.php to initialize the project. This will update required permissions for storage/framework/, storage/logs/, and bootstrap/cache/ and create the .env file from .env.example file. If it doesn't automatically redirect you to /install, then visit /install and complete the setup to finalize your .env file with the necessary database and other configuration. Take note of the API_KEY that was generated or provide your own key to be use with X-API-Key header.
5. Congratulation, you're all set!

Configuration/env Note

• API_KEY=set this to secure your api with X-API-Key header
• AUDIT_BUCKET=set all of the AWS configuration to enable s3 storage
• AUDIT_DISK=set the aws disk

API

Expect two headers:

• X-API-Key the API_KEY above
• X-Tenant the tenant id - must start with alpha character with remaining character of alphanumeric and underscore. Mininum of 3 characters and max of 20.

Separating Tenant and Table Name allow for better control and validation. It also allow for future support of JWT/Token Auth that contain information about the Tenant.

Run and visit /api/documentation for Swagger docs.

Features

• See list of features here laratt
• Simplify installation with rachidlaasri/laravel-installer.
• Simple authentication with X-API-Key header

Q and A

Why Laravel, and why not Lumin?

Laravel because Eloquent has everything we need. Primarily, the ability to set table prefix for multitenancy support. Because of all the feature of Laravel, this library was mostly completed within 3 days from start. Also, since our app will be accessing the database, Lumin would not have made a lot of performance improvement, ref: https://medium.com/@laurencei/lumen-vs-laravel-performance-in-2018-1a9346428c01 or https://jason.pureconcepts.net/2017/02/lumen-is-dead-long-live-lumen/

Why PHP vs (nodejs/lua/golang/csharp)?

Again, see why Laravel explained above. PHP is also easy to deploy, similar to other langs mentioned above. We can simply deploy this on some cPanel or similar hosting and/or docker. Hey, we can even do serverless (https://read.acloud.guru/serverless-php-630bb3e950f5) and combine with Aurora Serverless Database for high scalability.

Docker

What we're doing with docker is to use the most common/Official Docker Images for demonstration. For things like Letsencrypt SSL and custom docker container is outside the scope of this project. This allow us to present a docker-compose file in clear and simple manner, so to help user understand and maybe even provide a starting template for more complex scenario.

See docker-compose.example.yml for demonstration. Simply rename to docker-compose.yml and run:

docker-compose up

Note, we also configured innodb_file_per_table=1 in my.cnf which may help improve performance in this particular usage. It may degrade performance when the number of tables reach in the tens of thousands depending on your server resource.

MIT