Code Test - Contact Page

This is a code test to demonstrate a contact page.

Frameworks

• Backend - Symfony framework. Whilst this might be considered overkill for simply a contact page, a contact page would usually be part of a larger site where it would then be only practical to use some sort of MVC framework. By using Symfony things like routing, request handling, and creation of forms with CSRF tokens become much quicker to create. It also has many open-source plugins, which meant that implementing Recaptcha on the contact page was significantly simpler. Symfony also incorporates Doctrine and the Twig template engine, which means that properly escaping sql query parameters and escaping html characters is already handled correctly (provided the frameworks are used correctly).

• Frontend - Bootstrap framework. This made creating a user-friendly interface much simpler and it also makes it easy to adjust the web page to work on a a variety of device sizes if that was later needed.

Third party plugins

The EWZRecaptchaBundle was used to add in Recaptcha functionality to the contact page form.

Requirements

Before you can use this repository you will need:

1. WAMP (or similar stack) installed and running PHP 7.x.

2. Composer installed.

3. An email service (the simplest way is to create a gmail account and then choose gmail for your mailer_transport and provide your gmail username/password when prompted during the installation - be sure to turn on "allow less secure apps" for your gmail account to allow emails to be sent from it through this app).

4. A Google recaptcha public/private key pair. Go to the Google Recaptcha Admin page and then add localhost to the list of domains. Save your public and private keys (visible under the client/server side integration dropdowns).

Installation

These instructions were tested on WAMP, for other setups minor adjustments may be needed.

• Clone the repository to your desired directory.

• Inside the root directory of the repository run composer install. This will bring in Symfony and its dependencies along with the EWCRecaptchaBundle.

• Once all the dependencies are installed you wil be asked to provide the details for the parameters file. The details you will need are your database host and port, your chosen database name, login credentials for the database, your chosen mailer transport and host, login credentials for the mailer service, a secret key (used for CSRF token generation) and the public/private keys for your recaptcha.

• Now run the command php bin/console doctrine:database:create to create the database with the name you just chose.

• Now run the command php bin/console doctrine:schema:create to create the tables (only 1 actually).

• Finally, run php bin/console server:run to start the built-in server in Symfony.

If you ensure WAMP is running (for the database) and point your browser to localhost:8000 you should see the contact page.

The above instructions will setup the app in a dev environment (so the Symfony profiler will also be running). To deploy as if in a production environment (assuming you have just cloned the repositroy) run the following sequence of commands:

export SYMFONY_ENV=prod
# Ignore the error that comes up about unknown database with the next command
composer install --no-dev --optimize-autoloader
php bin/console doctrine:database:create
php bin/console doctrine:schema:create
# Run composer again to finish it off now we have the database
composer install --no-dev --optimize-autoloader
php bin/console cache:clear --env=prod --no-debug --no-warmup
php bin/console cache:warmup --env=prod

You will need to use .htaccess or other redirect methods to redirect users into the application as appropriate for your production environment.