JSON-RPC Communication for Laravel

• Installation
• Setup
  • Setting Project ID
  • Configure Projects
• Request Handler
  • Registering the route
  • Checking authorization
  • Validating the request
• Making a Request
• Running the RPC Server

Installation

Minions can be installed via composer:

composer require "katsana/minions"

Setup

The package will automatically register a service provider.

Next, you need to publish the Minions configuration file:

php artisan vendor:publish --provider="Minions\MinionsServiceProvider" --tag="config"

Setting Project ID

Each project need to have a unique Project ID to be used to identify authorized RPC requests. You can set the project ID on config/minions.php configuration file:

<?php

return [
    // ...
    
    'id' => 'project-id',
    
    // ...

];

Configure Projects

Next, you need to setup the project clients and servers information:

<?php

return [
    // ...
    
    'projects' => [
        'client-project-id' => [
            'token' => 'secret-token',
            'signature' => 'secret-signature',
        ],
        'server-project-id' => [
            'endpoint' => 'http://server-project-id:8084',
            'token' => 'another-secret-token',
            'signature' => 'another-secret-signature',
        ],
    ],

    // ...

];

• endpoint is only required for configurating server project connection from a client project. A server will never send request to a client project.
• Each project should have a pair of unique token and secret, this will be shared only by the client and server as a form of message verification.

Security

token is used as an Authorization bearer token header for the request and signature is used to sign the message sent via the request.

For projects running on private intranet you may skip setting up token and signature by setting the value to null.

Request Handler

To receive a request from a client, first we need to create a request handler on the server, for example let say we want to create a Add request.

<?php

namespace App\JsonRpc;

use Minions\Http\Request;
use Minions\Http\ValidatesRequests;

class MathAdd
{
    use ValidatesRequests;

    /**
     * Handle the incoming request.
     *
     * @param  \Minions\Http\Request  $request
     *
     * @return mixed
     */
    public function __invoke(Request $request)
    {
        return \array_sum($request->all());
    }

    /**
     * Authorize the incoming request.
     *
     * @param  \Minions\Http\Request  $request
     *
     * @return bool
     */
    public function authorize(Request $request): bool
    {
        return true;
    }
}

You can use php artisan minions:make MathAdd to generate the base stub file App\JsonRpc\MathAdd.

Registering the route

To register the route, all you need to do is add the request handler to routes/rpc.php:

<?php

use Minions\Router;


Router::rpc('math.add', 'App\JsonRpc\MathAdd');

You can run the following command to stub routes/rpc.php:

php artisan vendor:publish --provider="Minions\Http\MinionsServiceProvider" --tag="routes"

Checking authorization

You can check whether the project is authorized to use the request by overriding the authorize() method.

/**
 * Authorize the incoming request.
 *
 * @param  \Minions\Http\Request  $request
 *
 * @return bool
 */
public function authorize(Request $request): bool
{
    return $request->id() === 'platform'; // only allow access from `platform`
}

Validating the request

You can validate the request using Laravel Validation. Minions also introduce Minions\Http\ValidatesRequests trait which you can import and expose validate() and validateWith() method. e.g:

<?php

namespace App\JsonRpc;

use App\User;
use Minions\Http\Request;
use Minions\Http\ValidatesRequests;

class User
{
    use ValidatesRequests;
    
    /**
     * Handle the incoming request.
     *
     * @param  \Minions\Http\Request  $request
     *
     * @return mixed
     */
    public function __invoke(Request $request)
    {
        $this->validate($request, [
            'email' => ['required', 'email'],
        ]);

        return User::where('email', '=', $request['email'])->firstOrFail();
    }
}

Making a Request

To make a request, you can create the following code:

<?php

use Minions\Client\Message;
use Minions\Client\ResponseInterface;
use Minions\Minion;

Minion::broadcast('server-project-id', Minion::message(
    'math.add', [1, 2, 3, 4]
))->then(function (ResponseInterface $response) {
    assert(10, $response->getRpcResult());
});

Minion::run();

Running the RPC Server

To run Minions RPC Server, you have two options:

• ReactPHP RPC Server using katsana/minions-server
• Laravel Routing (Polyfill) RPC Server using katsana/minions-polyfill

Please go through each option documentation for installation and usages guide.