bramus/router — A lightweight and simple object oriented PHP Router

For one of the courses I teach I was in need of a PHP Router. Having explored the available routers out there I found they either were:

• Outdated
• Not object oriented
  (sorry Klein (which has been updated by now, but wasn’t at the time))
• Rather bad at the separation of concerns
  (sorry Ham & Klein; a router should only route, not handle templates/logging/sessions/…)
• Not powerful enough
  (sorry JREAM/route; there’s more than just GET you know)
• To be part of a bigger framework
  (sorry Silex and Slim)
• Bloated for a one-time lab/to get things quickly up and running
  (sorry Symfony Routing)
• …

In the end I decided to write one myself which I’ve polised for publication over the past few days. The result is bramus/router, a lightweight and simple object oriented PHP Router. A typical implementation of the class is this:

// Require composer autoloader
require __DIR__ . '/vendor/autoload.php';

// Create a Router
$router = new \Bramus\Router\Router();

// Custom 404 Handler
$router->set404(function() {
	header('HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found');
	echo '404, route not found!';
});

// Static route: / (homepage)
$router->get('/', function() {
	echo '<h1>bramus/router</h1><p>Try these routes:<p><ul><li>/hello/<em>name</em></li><li>/blog</li><li>/blog/<em>year</em></li><li>/blog/<em>year</em>/<em>month</em></li><li>/blog/<em>year</em>/<em>month</em>/<em>day</em></li></ul>';
});

// Dynamic route: /hello/name
$router->get('/hello/(\w+)', function($name) {
	echo 'Hello ' . htmlentities($name);
});

// Dynamic route with (successive) optional subpatterns: /blog(/year(/month(/day(/slug))))
$router->get('/blog(/\d{4}(/\d{2}(/\d{2}(/[a-z0-9_-]+)?)?)?)?', function($year = null, $month = null, $day = null, $slug = null) {
	if (!$year) { echo 'Blog overview'; return; }
	if (!$month) { echo 'Blog year overview (' . $year . ')'; return; }
	if (!$day) { echo 'Blog month overview (' . $year . '-' . $month . ')'; return; }
	if (!$slug) { echo 'Blog day overview (' . $year . '-' . $month . '-' . $day . ')'; return; }
	echo 'Blogpost ' . htmlentities($slug) . ' detail (' . $year . '-' . $month . '-' . $day . ')';
});

// Thunderbirds are go!
$router->run();

(Yes, you must get your PCRE mojo on in order to define dynamic routes)

bramus/router also supports before route middlewares, before router middlewares, and after router middleware. These features allow one to integrate bramus/router with their favorite library (logging, templating, …):

$router = new \Bramus\Router\Router();
$tpl = new \Acme\Template\Template();

$router->get('/', function() use ($tpl) {
    $tpl->load('home.tpl');
    $tpl->setdata(array(
        'name' => 'Bramus!'
    ));
});

$router->run(function() use ($tpl) {
    $tpl->display();
});

An extensive writeup of these features is available on GitHub.

A final note worth mentioning is that bramus/router is installable via Composer and is unit tested.

bramus/router (GitHub) →
bramus/router on Packagist →
bramus/router Travis CI build status →