Overview

Apiato ships with a few pre-defined and pre-configured containers. Some of these containers (e.g. Documentation) are installed by default with a fresh Apiato project.

Downloading and Installing Containers

Apiato provides an easy-to-use solution for downloading, installing and continuously updating containers from 3rd party developers.

As an application developer, you simply need to include the respective vendor/project to thecomposer.json.

For example, your /composer.json file may look something like this:

{
  "require": {
    "apiato/some-container": "^2.0.1"
  }
}

You just need to call composer update in order to install the respective packages. The package (e.g., the container) apiato/settings-container is then installed into the app/Containers/Vendor directory. However, the developer of the package needs to follow some basic guidelines listed below.

Warning

Do not modify content within a downloaded container, as it will be overwritten if you call composer update.

Modifying Containers

To modify the code of this container usually you just need to copy the container to AppSection (or any of your custom sections) and update the namespaces. (See each container documentation for more details)

Developing a Container

Developing a container that can be used by others is quite easy. Basically, you can extract already existing functionality in a new container and provide the features. Note that you need to upload the container to GitHub and then release it on Packagist in order for it to be available via Composer. Please see a respective tutorial how to submit a package to GitHub and release it via Packagist.

In particular, the only thing that needs to be done, when developing a container is to provide a specific composer.json file in the root of the container directory.

An example of such a composer.json file is shown below:

{
  "name": "vendor/project",
  "description": "This is a short description for your container.",
  "type": "apiato-container",   // you must set the type to "apiato-container" here.
  "require": {
    "somevendor/somepackage" : "dev-master"
    // some other requirements here
  },
  "extra": {
    "apiato": {
      "container": {
        "name": "Foo"   // The name of the container in the app/Containers/Vendor directory
      }
    }
  }
}

Important Information:

• You must add the respective type : apiato-container to the composer file. This way, the custom installer is used that allows installing/updating containers.
• You must provide the key extra.apiato.container.name. This key indicates the name of the folder (e.g., container) when installing the package to the app/Containers/Vendor directory. In the shown example, the container would be installed to app/Containers/Vendor/Foo.