Laravel Microservices

A simple laravel pseudo-microservices demo project. This is NOT a real "microservices" setup or at least something that is production ready! It is only here to point out the separation of concerns between each service and get you started with a containerized local environment using docker with a reverse proxy on top.

This project consists of three web services user, product & order and one API gateway api-gateway.

The webservices are containerised with Docker and are accessible within a Traefik proxy interface.

traefik image is used for the proxy container and php:7.1-apache is used and extended for the web services containers & the API gateway

The api is using the Guzzle API Client in order to maintain connection with the web services.

Lumen was preferred since it is an easy way to expose APIs.

Set up

Install Docker

The current Docker environment is based on Docker Toolbox. If you don't have Docker Toolbox installed, you can download it here.

Create a docker-machine *

    docker-machine create laravel-microservices
    eval $(docker-machine env laravel-microservices)

Mount volumes as NFS

To prevent permission problems we leverage Docker-Machine-NFS to mount volumes as NFS. First, install docker-machine-nfs and then run the following command:

docker-machine-nfs laravel-microservices --nfs-config="-alldirs -maproot=0" --mount-opts="noacl,async,nolock,vers=3,udp,noatime,actimeo=1"

Create the external network

    docker network create traefik_webgateway

Update the your hosts file

    # Get the ip of the VMachine
    docker-machine ip laravel-microservices
    
    # Update /etc/hosts file
    192.168.99.100 lm.local user.lm.local inventory.lm.local order.lm.local api.lm.local

Setup all services

In order to get up and running, you need to setup each individual service.

• user
• order
• inventory
• api gateway

Once you set all services, you are ready to use them.

Build & Run

    docker-compose -f docker/docker-compose.yml up -d --build

Access

You can access the applications from:

    #user
    http://user.lm.local
    
    #inventory
    http://inventory.lm.local
    
    #order
    http://order.lm.local
    
    #api gateway
    http://api.lm.local

Reverse proxies

You can access Traefik interface from:

    http://lm.local:8080

Teardown and "Scale"

Teardown

    docker-compose -f docker/docker-compose.yml down --volumes --remove-orphans

Scale

    # DEPRECATED
    docker-compose -f docker/docker-compose.yml scale ${container-name}

Isolate Web Services

Removing the traefik.frontend.rule from the Web services will make them accessible only from the API gateway (traefik backend network)

Your Next Steps

Once you get started, you need to consider some of the following:

• Use databases to store data. You can add new docker mysql containers in docker/docker-compose.yml and apply proxy configuration in order to be able to access them.
• Each service must be accessible from a unique entry point, in our case the APIs. This should be the only way for communication between services.
• Communication between the services should not be direct. One service should not be aware of the other! This type of communication can be achieved by using messaging or events.
• Tests are essential part of software development. Functionality of each service should be unit tested. Functionality of the whole flow should be functionally tested.
• This is a setup that is using older versions of Docker, Laravel/Lumen. Update them in order to be able to use their latest features.