Laravel ❤️ Startups

Fit to scale?

Luckey Homes

Takes the pain out of Airbnb
Created 18 months ago
30+ team
5 Laravel developers

Chosing Laravel for your Startup

Fast Onboarding
Big community
Lots of packages

💪🏻 Pros

Recruitment in Paris
Scalability
- Architecture?
- Successful examples?

👎🏻 Cons

=> What would I do differently?

Big app complexity

Sales Module
Employee Module
MailServer Module
PhoneServer Module
BookingManagement Module
Contractor Tasks Module
Invoicing Module
CashFlow Module
Hiring Module

LuckeyHomes.com
Luckey.backend
Luckey.finance
Luckey.sales

Good principles to start

Testing
Inversion of control & Dependency Injection
SOLID Principles
Domain Driven Design
Makefile + strong CI

Lack of resources regarding micro-services in PHP
Keeping things clean = significantly increase codebase
Dramatically decrease performance (HTTP Layers, Encoding + Decoding)

DDD or Microservices

Great to maintain abstraction and flexibility but...

=> Failure for synchronus micro-services
Still cool for asynchrous ms, replacing the HTTP Layer by a Redis Queue

A new folder structure

---| app
   | domain
   | bootstrap
   | config
   | public
   | tests
   | storage
   | vendor
   | (database)
   | (resources)

The app/ directory

---| app
   | domain
   | bootstrap
   | config
   | public
   | tests
   | storage
   | vendor
   | (database)
   | (resources)

Laravel specific logic
API Logic
Shared exceptions
Shared abstracts for various components : Raygun, Intercom, Algolia...
=> Never add any business logic here

The domain/ directory

domain -| TaskManagement -| Models
                          | Requests
                          | Jobs
                          | Subscribers
                          | Policies
                          | Mailables
                          | Expose -| API -| Transformers
                                          -| Controllers
                                           routes.php

                                   -| Web -| Views
                                          -| Controllers
                                           routes.php

                                   -| CLI -| Commands

                                   -| Resources -| Mails
                                                -| Middlewares
                                                -| Langs

                          | storage
                          | vendor
                          composer.json

       -| BusinessLogic2 -| ...

Each directory gets a composer.json
+ namespace LuckeyHomes/BusinessLogic
to be switched to a package easily

Tweaking the composer.json

{
    "require": {
        "wikimedia/composer-merge-plugin": "dev-master",
        "twilio/sdk": "^4.5",
        "algolia/algoliasearch-laravel": "^1.0",
        "intercom/intercom-php": "^3.0"
    },
    "scripts": {
        "post-install-cmd": "./scripts/composer-post-install.sh",
        "production-warmup": [
            "php artisan config:cache",
            "php artisan route:cache"
        ]
    },
    "extra": {
        "merge-plugin": {
            "include": [
                "domain/*/composer.json"
            ],
            "require": [
                "submodule/composer.json"
            ],
            "recurse": true,
            "replace": true,
            "merge-dev": true,
            "merge-extra": true,
            "merge-scripts": true
        }
    }
}

Tweaking Laravel core

Easy = Put models + controllers + routes
Into separate folder w/ dedicated service provider
Harder = Migrations, Views, Langs...
ServiceProvider functions: loadViewsFrom, loadTranslationsFrom

From Laravel 5.4: loadMigrationsFrom

Warning: makes updates more difficult! Breaks auto-updater

Makefiles to bundle it all

FIG=docker-compose 
EXEC=exec --user=laradock workspace sh
EXECB=exec --user=laradock workspace bash

.PHONY: test
test:
	cp .env .env.backup
	cp .env.travis .env
	$(FIG) up -d
	@(if [ "$(filter-out $@,$(MAKECMDGOALS))" = "" ]; \
	then $(FIG) $(EXEC) -c "vendor/bin/codecept run -f"; \
	else $(FIG) $(EXEC) -c "vendor/bin/codecept run -f domain/$(filter-out $@,$(MAKECMDGOALS))/tests/ -f"; fi)
	$(FIG) stop
	mv .env.backup .env

Other learnings

Updates will be tiresome: chose the LTS version
Event-driven rather than logic in controller
(subscribers + abstracts of eloquent.updated: *)
Cache + compile, Blackfire
Install an error tracking tool
Heroku-like paas is nice

Going further

Publishing to sub-repositories?
Call service provider only when matching route?
Load balancer => call the needed part only
Log flagging
Serving assets on multiple domains?

deck

By Félix