Lumen on App Engine

Laravel announced today that they are launching a new PHP framework named Lumen for building API’s and microservices.  It has an emphasis on speed and it is compatible with a subset of Laravel, making for easy migrations to the larger framework.

I wanted to see how easy it would be to run a Lumen app on App Engine, and I fooled around with it a bit. You just do a simple setting in app.yaml to route all of the apps traffic to the default handler for the Lumen app:

application: [your application id]
version: one
runtime: php55
api_version: 1

handlers:

- url: /.*
  script: /[path_to_lumen_folder]/public/index.php

With that I got a basic instance running. I did run into one problem though.  The logger tried to write to disk, which is a no-no for App Engine. If this happens you will get an error like this:

Fatal error: Uncaught exception 'UnexpectedValueException' with message 'The stream or file "[Path to your lumen app]/storage/logs/lumen.log" could not be opened

One little configuration tweak got it working though. In [path to your lumen app ]vendor/laravel/lumen-framework/src/Application.php, you have to tweak the logger a bit.

First you add a reference to the right library:

use MonologHandlerSyslogHandler;

And then replace the function getMonologHandler() with this:

protected function getMonologHandler()
{
return new SyslogHandler('intranet', 'user', Logger::DEBUG, false, LOG_PID);
}

This advice was taken from the guide for Laravel on PHP for App Engine.

All in all, it is a relatively quick little framework, and having using App Engine to scale out the services it provides seems like a no-brainer.

All code shown here is licensed under Apache 2. For more details find the original source on Github.