Contribution and Development Guide

This guide details how to set up a local development environment to work on the Alxarafe framework.

Development Environment (Monorepo)

To facilitate development and testing without needing to publish packages to Packagist, the repository includes a demo application in the skeleton/ folder.

This application is configured to use the framework source code (src/) directly from the local disk, thanks to Composer's path repository functionality.

Structure

• src/: Framework source code (what you are editing).
• skeleton/: Demo application to test your changes.
  • skeleton/Modules/: Test application modules.
  • skeleton/public/: Web entry point.

Initial Setup

1. Open a terminal and go to the skeleton folder:

   cd skeleton

2. Install dependencies (this will link the framework locally):

   composer install

3. Verify that the symbolic link has been created. In skeleton/vendor/alxarafe/alxarafe you should see a symbolic link pointing to the repository root.

Running the Test Server

To bring up the demo application, you can use PHP's built-in web server:

# From the skeleton/ folder
php -S localhost:8080 -t public

Now open your browser at http://localhost:8080. You should see the welcome page of the Demo module served by Alxarafe.

Workflow

1. Make changes to the framework files in src/ (e.g. src/Core/Base/Controller.php).
2. Refresh the browser at localhost:8080.
3. The changes are reflected instantly! No need to do composer update.

Adding new test modules

If you need to test specific functionality, you can add controllers and views in skeleton/Modules/Demo/.

Next Steps

• Containerization with Docker (Pending)