Hexavel is a restructured version of Laravel, with the purpose of providing better work flows which will simplify the development process.

To install via composer simply use the command

composer create-project --prefer-dist peterfox/hexavel <name of your project>

Hexavel uses a widely changed filesystem from Laravel with which to produce a working application. Each folder is explained before so you can understand where to find or place your own work.

This is where all our console applications go, including the artisan console and the binaries install via composer. All of artisan's commands work the same as Laravel except now you must use bin/artisan instead from the root directory of your application.

This is where our base PHP application code goes using the default namespace \App.

For the moment this simply stores our applications configs and routing file.

This is our biggest change from Laravel. Support is how it sounds, a directory for all files that support the development of our application. This covers views, assets, language files, tests and migrations by default.

Variable directory is effectively our application writable directory. All caches and data written by the application should be stored under this directory. Examples would be the bootstrap cache, logs or an sqlite database.

Hexagonal architecture is a fancy name for a simple concept, you should separate your code into what's your framework, your domain and the connections between services and or libraries that your application interacts with.

Code that relates to the core of your application in this case Laravel specific code like service providers or controllers.

Code that relates to services or libraries that are used by the application.

Code which is unique to your business requirements and is separate to the bridge and framework.

The repository pattern is really important and it's useful when working with the Models you'll create using Eloquent. To make this easier there's a service provider included which allows you to map your models to repositories and in turn map repository interfaces from your domain to your model interfaces.

Example Repository:

namespace App\Bridge\Eloquent;

use App\Bridge\Eloquent\Model\User;
use App\Domain\AuthenticatableRepository as AuthenticatableRepositoryInterface;
use Hexavel\Repository\EloquentRepository;
use Illuminate\Contracts\Auth\Authenticatable;

class AuthenticatableRepository extends EloquentRepository implements AuthenticatableRepositoryInterface
{
    public function getModel()
    {
        return User::class;
    }

    /**
     * @param string $email
     * @return Authenticatable
     */
    public function findByAuthIdentifier($email)
    {
        return $this->model->where('email', $email)->first();
    }
}

Then add the model and repositories to the service provider.

namespace App\Laravel\Providers;

use App\Bridge\Eloquent\Model\User;
use App\Bridge\Eloquent\AuthenticatableRepository;
use App\Domain\AuthenticatableRepository as AuthenticatableRepositoryInterface;
use Hexavel\Support\Providers\RepositoryProvider as ServiceProvider;

class RepositoryServiceProvider extends ServiceProvider
{

    /**
     * @return string[]
     */
    protected function getModelRepositories()
    {
        return [
            AuthenticatableRepository::class => User::class
        ];
    }

    /**
     * @return string[]
     */
    protected function getRepositories()
    {
        return [
            AuthenticatableRepositoryInterface::class => AuthenticatableRepository::class
        ];
    }
}

Testing is a huge part of any good application that you're developing. Hexavel includes a simple setup for using both Behat and PHPSpec to allow you to test both the features and the code you develop.

Your feature files can be created under support/features, while the feature context for your test suite is under support/context. You can run tests via bin/behat or by calling gulp behat.

To make separating the code easier the set up is ready for using the page pattern as a way of managing the interactions with your application for testing via Behat.

Class specs are stored in support/spec they can be created simply by using the phpspec command bin/phpspec desc <Namespace\\Class> and then you can call bin/phpspec run or gulp phpSpec to perform the tests.