Slim framework - cannot interpret routes with dot

Question

Problem Statement

I'm currently working on an internal RESTful API, and I'm using our main domain name as an environment identifier. However, I noticed that Slim does not like it at all for a route to have dot in there.

Sample case

I have a local web server running using PHP's built-in webserver, and I invoked php -S 0.0.0.0:5000 to get it running.

Once the web server is up, I have a simple 'hello world' on the index page. Everything's working fine and dandy.

I then set up a route as following:

$app->get('/:domain/:id', function($domain, $id) 
{
    echo $domain . ' ' . $id;
} 

With this, I set up the route to hopefully resolve 0.0.0.0:5000/apple.com/juicers. I tried with 0.0.0.0:5000/apple/juicers and the page prints out apple juicers. But with 0.0.0.0:5000/apple.com/juicers, I get a 404 Not Found error.

What I've tried so far

URL Rewrite

I looked up the available resources on Google, and from Slim framework's Github issues as well. It seems like someone encountered a similar issue: https://github.com/codeguy/Slim/issues/359

The proposed solution in that ticket was: URL rewriting fix. I tried that but to no avail. I set up a .htaccess at the root of my project directory, and turned on AllowOverRide All in my Mac's httpd.conf file.

php -S 0.0.0.0:5000 index.php

Instead of running php -S 0.0.0.0:5000 by itself, I ran the command on index.php. At this point, instead of throwing a Not Found error, the slim framework is resolving to my base route, which I set up as follows:

$app->get('/', function() { echo "hello world"; });

Thank you

I'm at my wit's end, and any help will be highly appreciated. Thank you so much for reading!

Answer 1

Slim relies on $_SERVER['SCRIPT_NAME'] which is supposed to be the routing file (Apache's DirectoryIndex, and the file where the Rewrite points to. Let's say index.php for the example below).

In PHP embedded server, if the URI contains a dot in the file part, then PHP does not position properly the SCRIPT_NAME value.

You can use the following tweak to mimic the RewriteRule behavior:

Create a router.php file and send all the requests through it with your PHP embedded server:

$_SERVER['SCRIPT_NAME'] = 'index.php';
include 'index.php';

Then, aunch the PHP embedded server with:

php -S 0.0.0.0:<port> -t <your-Http-document-root> router.php

The router.php file will not be in use in your production environment. Only the PHP embedded server uses it, and it should solve your "Routes With Dots" issue.

Answer 2

Root issue - PHP Development server

After playing with different Slim conditions and experiments, I started to look closer at the server level and making sure that the URL was passed correctly to the Slim routes.

Turns out this was an issue with PHP's development server, which is available through the php -S command.

A quick google search revealed that several others had encountered the same issue, and it was a server issue, rather than a bug in Slim.

Solution

To test out my solution, I ran MAMP, and transferred all my files over. And then I wrote the .htaccess to redirect all requests through to index.php.

The moment of truth:

I typed in localhost:8888/campaigns/demo.com/12 and a wave of joy surged through my veins as I saw a line of beautiful, gorgeous demo.com/12 written across the browser! (I have an echo statement for that particular route) A week-plus of troubleshooting and tinkering around has finally bore fruit!

Celebratory Hoorah!

＼(＾O＾)／ Hoorah for Apache!

Thanks for your help @adosaiguas!

Answer 3

I would give a try to slim's Route Conditions. You should be able to specify something like this to allow dots in your parameter:

$app->get('/:domain/:id', function($domain, $id) {
    echo $domain . ' ' . $id;
})->conditions(array('domain' => '[a-zA-Z\.]+'));

If this does not work, you should think on using another character instead of a dot to separate the domain name from the TLD and then replace it in the function:

$app->get('/:domain/:id', function($domain, $id) {
    $domain = str_replace('_', '.', $domain);
    echo $domain . ' ' . $id;
})->conditions(array('domain' => '[a-zA-Z_]+'));

It is not so elegant, but it works.

Answer 4

I've just added this to the top of router script (index.php in my case):

if (PHP_SAPI === 'cli-server') {
  $_SERVER['SCRIPT_NAME'] = pathinfo(__FILE__, PATHINFO_BASENAME);
}

Usage example:

$ php -S localhost:8080 -t public index.php