Laravel Stack

Laravel is an excellent choice for cloud applications. It is a modern framework with advanced features, and it's easy to deploy on AWS with Vapor.

Our general pattern for Laravel apps closely mirrors a new out-of-the-box Laravel installation. In cases where we are interacting with APIs heavily, we will make more use of the cache and implement a repository pattern around our models:

Stack

Laravel provides most of the application stack.

The Administrative Systems Seal of Approval

These serve as a good set of "default" options for things.

There may be use-cases where something else is better, but unless & until a justification can be made to use something else, you should draw from this list.

Using the same libraries will allow AS developers to transfer between projects more easily, as technical competencies developed in one project will be transferrable to other projects.

Package	Purpose
PostgreSQL (available as Aurora Serverless RDS for PostgreSQL on AWS)	Relational DB
AWS DynamoDB	Document DB, session store, cache
Eloquent	DB access / ORM
laravel-soa	WebSSO, common API bindings
Guzzle	HTTP client
Carbon	DateTime & timezone manipulation
Pusher Channels	Websocket driver for broadcasting
Blade	Templating engine
northwestern-laravel-ui	Bootstrap 4 theme & layouts
pnpm	Front-end package management
Bootstrap 5 *	General purpose UI toolkit
Font Awesome *	Icons
PHPUnit	Unit & feature testing
Livewire	Rich UI, for AJAX
AlpineJS	Rich UI, client-side only
Cypress	Functional & E2E testing
sentry-php	Exception logging (backend)
@sentry/browser †	Exception logging (frontend)
Horizon with Redis	Queues & async processing (on-prem)
vapor-ui with Amazon SQS	Queues & async processing (AWS)
Apache & PHP-FPM	On-prem deployment
Laravel Vapor	AWS serverless deployment

^* The northwestern-laravel-ui package will set up Bootstrap & Font Awesome.

† The northwestern-laravel-ui package includes Sentry's browser SDK and will auto-configure it based on the settings for sentry-php.

Frontend

For applications, this stack uses Bootstrap with an NU theme. This does not try to replicate the look of the NU Department Templates, but still gives you an obviously-NU-branded look & feel.

Bootstrap is our tool of choice here because it is providing a large number of ready-made UI components that have been tested cross-browser & for accessibility. This allows developers to focus on the custom business logic for their application instead of CSS arcana.

For AJAX-y things you'd typically achieve with jQuery, instead consider Livewire. Livewire enables us to write rich AJAX-y UIs entirely in PHP and Blade. This makes the application more testable (PHPUnit can test this code), and transfers competency with PHP & Blade to the frontend instead of requiring you to write JavaScript.

Note that the use of jQuery should be phased out across all applications.

Easing in to Livewire

Livewire is not a replacement for a frontend framework. It does not take control of the entire frontend.

You can begin adding Livewire to an existing Laravel application gradually. If a developer is working on a new feature, they can add a Livewire component without disrupting any of the existing functionality.

Livewire is not appropriate for all tasks jQuery is used for. If you need to do something purely client-side in the browser, it is recommended to write 'vanilla' JavaScript without depending on any additional libraries/frameworks.

Repositories

In a normal Laravel app, you are assumed to have a relational database. Eloquent is an active record ORM, so models encapsulate both your domain models (e.g. attributes & method you add) and the data storage logic (save(), find(), etc).

In some situations, it is better to hide the details of data storage with a repository class:

• The logic is complicated and thus should not live in your controller
• The model isn't stored in your database (and thus is not an Eloquent model)

If you have used Hibernate in Java, a repository is essentially a data access object: a dedicated class that reads & writes models from storage. The storage could be anything: a database, an API, or a cache. The model and all of its business logic is a separate object that you pass in & get out of the repository.

A repository method should not be aware of any validation logic, business logic, roles, or privileges. All of the data it needs should be validated elsewhere & passed in. The method should only be invoked if it is appropriate to do so.

The only logic included in a repository should be related to persisting data -- e.g. if we specify column_a, then column_b should be nulled out, or if column_c has changed we should add an entry to audit_log.

We keep the repositories in app/Repositories. Methods should return the relevant model w/ its updates. Whenever possible, complex write operations should be wrapped in a transaction.

Eloquent Repository Example

namespace App\Repositories;

use Carbon\Carbon;
use App\Models\Application;
use App\Models\Status;

class ExampleRepository
{
    public function updateStatus(Application $app, Status $status, $user_id = null): Application
    {
        return DB::transaction(function () use ($app, $status, $user_id) {
            $app->status()->associate($status);

            $milestone_at_column = $status->milestone_timestamp_column;
            if ($milestone_at_column != null) {
                $app->$milestone_at_column = Carbon::now();
            }

            $milestone_by_user_column = $status->milestone_track_user_id_column;
            if ($milestone_by_user_column != null) {
                $app->$milestone_by_user_column = $user_id;
            }

            $app->save();

            // Update the updated_at timestamp on the underlying app
            $app->application->touch();

            return $app->refresh();
        });
    }
}

API Repository Example

namespace App\Repositories;

use App\API\ExternalAPI;
use App\Models\Application;
use App\Models\Status;

class ExampleRepository
{
    private $api;

    public function __construct(ExternalAPI $api)
    {
        $this->api = $api;
    }

    public function get(string $id): Application
    {
        // Logic for re-trying & auth should live in your API binding class
        $raw_data = $this->api->get($id);

        // Hydrate & return a model
        return new Application($raw_data);
    }

    public function updateStatus(Application $app, Status $status, $user_id = null): Application
    {
        $this->api->update($app->id, [
            'status_id' => $status->id,
        ]);

        return $this->get($app->id);
    }
}

Deploying

Laravel apps can be deployed on-premise (legacy applications) or on AWS.

When on-prem, the servers are Cyberinfrastructure-supported RedHat Enterprise Linux VMs. The latest version of PHP available in the RedHat Software Collections (RHSCL) should be used.

For cloud deployments, we use Laravel Vapor to deploy onto AWS. Please see the article on Vapor under the infrastructure section for more information about deploying with Vapor.