Porter Quick Start Guide

This quick start guide will walk through getting up and running with Porter from scratch, without a framework, and assumes we already have a PHP environment set up with Composer. If you use Symfony, check out the Symfony quickstart guide, too.

This steps in this guide are automatically verified by a nightly CI build to ensure their correctness. However, if you encounter any errors or get stuck, don't hesitate to file an issue.

Let's start by initializing our Composer file by running the following command in our project's root directory and accepting the defaults. We can skip defining dependencies interactively because we'll issue separate commands in a moment.

composer init

For this demo we'll use the European Central Bank (ECB) provider by including it in our composer.json with the following command.

Note: The ECB provider requires Amp v3, which is currently in beta, so we need to allow beta dependencies temporarily. This can be enabled with the following commands.

composer config minimum-stability beta
composer config prefer-stable true

composer require provider/european-central-bank

We now have the provider installed along with all its dependencies, including Porter herself. We want to create a new Porter instance now, but we need to pass a ContainerInterface to her constructor. Any PSR-11 container is valid, but let's use Joomla DI for now.

composer require --with-dependencies joomla/di

Create a new container and register an instance of EuropeanCentralBankProvider with it. Pass the container to a new Porter instance. Don't forget to include the autoloader!

use Joomla\DI\Container;
use ScriptFUSION\Porter\Porter;
use ScriptFUSION\Porter\Provider\EuropeanCentralBank\Provider\EuropeanCentralBankProvider;

require 'vendor/autoload.php';

$container = new Container;
$container->set(EuropeanCentralBankProvider::class, new EuropeanCentralBankProvider);

$porter = new Porter($container);

We're now ready to import any of the ECB's resources. Let's import the latest daily foreign exchange rates provided by DailyForexRates. Porter's import() method requires a Import that accepts the resource we want to import.

use ScriptFUSION\Porter\Import\Import;
use ScriptFUSION\Porter\Provider\EuropeanCentralBank\Provider\Resource\DailyForexRates;

$rates = $porter->import(new Import(new DailyForexRates));

Porter returns an iterator, so we can now loop over the rates and print them out.

foreach ($rates as $rate) {
    echo "$rate[currency]: $rate[rate]\n";
}

This outputs something similar to the following, with today's current rates.

USD: 1.2304
JPY: 131.66
BGN: 1.9558
CZK: 25.357
DKK: 7.4469
...

Since these rates come from the European Central Bank, they're relative to the Euro (EUR), which is assumed to always be 1. We can use this information to write a currency converter that's always up-to-date with the latest exchange rate information.

This just scratches the surface of Porter without going into any details. Explore the rest of the manual to gain a fuller understanding of the features at your disposal.

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