External libraries

Using external libraries with eQual¶

eQual supports the PSR-4 standard for autoloading.

Composer can be used to add dependencies inside the /vendor folder located in the root folder of eQual installation.

Libraries that follow the PSR-4 standard can be loaded with a simple use statement. For libraries that do not provide such support, simply use 'require' or 'include' as stated in the documentation of the library.

The require command adds new libraries to the composer.json. The require need the library names (e.g) swiftmailer/swiftmailer and version constraints (e.g) ^6.2

    "require": {
            "swiftmailer/swiftmailer": "^6.2",
        },

Open your CLI at the root of eQual's folder and use this :

$ ./equal.run --do=init_composer

Examples¶

Here below are a few examples showing how to embed various popular libraries.

Twig - template engine¶

$ composer require "twig/twig:^2.0"

<?php
use Twig\Environment;
use Twig\Loader\FilesystemLoader;

PHPOffice - MS Office compatible documents generation library¶

$ composer require phpoffice/phpspreadsheet

<?php
use PhpOffice\PhpSpreadsheet\Spreadsheet;
use PhpOffice\PhpSpreadsheet\IOFactory;

DOMPDF - HTML to PDF converter¶

$ composer require dompdf/dompdf

<?php
use Dompdf\Dompdf;
use Dompdf\Options;

For libraries that do not support autoloading, it is still a good practice to store them in the /vendor folder, and then including them manually by using include or require:

<?php
require_once '../vendor/swiftmailer/swiftmailer/lib/swift_required.php';

However, once included, you can still take advantage of the use statement in order to make the syntax smoother and not to bother with namespaces.

<?php
require_once '../vendor/swiftmailer/swiftmailer/lib/swift_required.php';

use \Swift_SmtpTransport as Swift_SmtpTransport;
use \Swift_Message as Swift_Message;
use \Swift_Mailer as Swift_Mailer;