Aimeos Slim package

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Aimeos is THE professional, full-featured and high performance e-commerce package for Laravel! You can install it in your existing SlimPHP application within 5 minutes and can adapt, extend, overwrite and customize anything to your needs.

Table of content

• Installation/Update
• Setup
• Admin
• Hints
• License
• Links

Installation or update

This document is for the latest Aimeos SlimPHP 2019.10 release and later.

• Beta release: 2020.01
• LTS release: 2019.10

This tutorial assumes a directory layout as used in the Slim skeleton application created by:

composer create-project slim/slim-skeleton:~3.1 [my-app-name]

The Aimeos Slim e-commerce package is a composer based library that can be installed easiest by using Composer. Add these lines to your composer.json of your Slim project:

    "prefer-stable": true,
    "minimum-stability": "dev",
    "require": {
        "aimeos/aimeos-slim": "~2019.10",
        ...
    },

Afterwards, install the Aimeos shop package using

composer update

The next step is to copy the required configuration and route files to your src/ directory so you have your own copy you can modify according to your needs. When you upgrade from a previous version, you should have a backup of these files. You can then reapply the changes you've made in the past to the updated files.

cp vendor/aimeos/aimeos-slim/src/aimeos-settings.php src/
cp vendor/aimeos/aimeos-slim/src/aimeos-routes.php src/

To configure your database, you have to adapt the configuration in src/aimeos-settings.php file and modify the settings in the resource section:

'resource' => [
    'db' => [
        'adapter' => 'mysql',
        'host' => 'localhost',
        'port' => '',
        'socket' => '',
        'database' => 'slim',
        'username' => 'root',
        'password' => '',
        'stmt' => ["SET SESSION sort_buffer_size=2097144; SET NAMES 'utf8mb4'; SET SESSION sql_mode='ANSI'"],
        'opt-persistent' => 0,
        'limit' => 3,
        'defaultTableOptions' => [
            'charset' => 'utf8mb4',
            'collate' => 'utf8mb4_bin',
        ],
    ],
],

If you don't have at least MySQL 5.7 installed, you will probably get an error like

Specified key was too long; max key length is 767 bytes

To circumvent this problem, change the charset/collate setting in your src/aimeos-settings.php to these values before installing Aimeos:

'resource' => [
    'db' => [
        // ...
        'defaultTableOptions' => [
            'charset' => 'utf8',
            'collation' => 'utf8_bin'
        ],
    ],
],

If you want to use a database server other than MySQL, please have a look into the article about supported database servers and their specific configuration.

Setting up or upgrading existing tables in the database is done via:

php vendor/aimeos/aimeos-core/setup.php --config=src/aimeos-settings.php --option=setup/default/demo:1

In a production environment or if you don't want that the demo data is added, leave out the --option=setup/default/demo:1 option.

You must also copy the Aimeos templates to the templates/ directory of your Slim application. Thus, you can modify them according to your needs and they won't be overwritten by the next composer update:

cp -r vendor/aimeos/aimeos-slim/templates/* templates/

The last step is to publish the Aimeos theme files to the public/ directory, so they are available via HTTP:

mkdir -p public/aimeos/themes/
cp -r vendor/aimeos/aimeos-slim/resources/mimeicons/ public/aimeos/
cp -r ext/ai-client-html/client/html/themes/* public/aimeos/themes/
cp -r ext/ai-admin-jqadm/admin/jqadm/themes/* public/aimeos/themes/

Setup

Aimeos requires some objects to be available (like the Aimeos context) and the routes for generating the URLs. Both are added automatically if you add the lines starting with $aimeos right after the $app = new \Slim\App($settings); statement in your public/index.php file:

$app = new \Slim\App($settings);

$aimeos = new \Aimeos\Slim\Bootstrap( $app, require '../src/aimeos-settings.php' );
$aimeos->setup( '../ext' )->routes( '../src/aimeos-routes.php' );

// Set up dependencies

The Aimeos Slim package uses the Twig template engine to render the templates. Therefore, you have to setup the view object with a configured Twig instance. Copy the lines below at the end of your src/dependencies.php file:

// Twig view + Aimeos templates
$container['view'] = function ($c) {
	$conf = ['cache' => '../cache'];
	$view = new \Slim\Views\Twig(__DIR__ . '/../templates', $conf);
	$view->addExtension(new \Slim\Views\TwigExtension($c->get('router'), $c->get('request')->getUri()));
	return $view;
};

Note: You can use the Slim PHP template engine as well if you reimplement the existing templates in PHP, but Twig has one major advantage: Templates can inherit from a common base template, so you don't have to copy the whole HTML page into each template.

Caution: The Slim skeleton application contain a route for /[{name}] in src/routes.php which you have to remove first. It's so generic that it shadows routes from Aimeos!

Then, you should be able to call the catalog list page in your browser. For a quick start, you can use the integrated web server that is available since PHP 5.4. Simply execute this command in the base directory of your application:

php -S 127.0.0.1:8000 -t public

Point your browser to the list page of the shop using:

Since 2019.04: http://127.0.0.1:8000/shop Until 2019.01: http://127.0.0.1:8000/list

Admin

The Aimeos package for the Slim PHP framework also contains an administration interface for managing products and other content. If the internal PHP web server (php -S 127.0.0.1:8000 -t public) is still running, you can find it at:

http://127.0.0.1:8000/admin

Caution: It's important to protect the administration interface with a password or some other kind of authentication!

The easiest way is to add HTTP basic authentication (the browser is asking for user name and password) to all /admin URLs. In Slim, there's a middleware which you can add to your application. To install it, execute

composer require tuupola/slim-basic-auth

on the command line in your application directory. Afterwards, adapt your public/index.php file and add these lines before $app->run():

$app->add(new \Tuupola\Middleware\HttpBasicAuthentication([
	"realm" => "Aimeos administration",
	"path" => "/admin",
	"users" => [
		"admin" => "secret",
	],
]));

Note: The "users" array can contain a list of user name / password combinations and you need to use a really secret password!

Hints

To simplify development, you should configure to use no content cache. You can do this in the src/aimeos-settings.php file of your Slim application by adding these lines at the bottom:

    'madmin' => array(
        'cache' => array(
            'manager' => array(
                'name' => 'None',
            ),
        ),
    ),

If caching is enabled, you have to execute the following command to clear the cache if you change e.g. configuration settings:

php vendor/aimeos/aimeos-slim/cache.php --config=src/aimeos-settings.php

License

The Aimeos Slim package is licensed under the terms of the LGPLv3 license and is available for free.

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