Concord

Vanilo uses Concord for managing their modules.

Concord is a Laravel Extension that serves as a foundation to build Modules for Laravel Applications on top of Laravel's built in Service Providers.

Modules are usually external libraries (aka extensions) installed with composer in the target application.

For more details check Concord on github or refer to its Documentation.

When you're using Vanilo for your web application or API, it's likely that you won't interact much with Concord.

However if you plan to create re-usable extensions for Vanilo, Concord provides quite several solutions for that.

#Concord Overview

The most important information is that Concord modules are Laravel Service Providers with some extra functionality. Concord also uses conventions (customizable) so that modules are using an identical structure.

#Listing Modules

Use the php artisan concord:modules -a command to list the installed modules.

#Contents Of A Module

A module encapsulates "parts" like:

• models (Eloquent),
• migrations, seeds,
• views,
• routes,
• middleware,
• controllers,
• requests,
• frontend assets,
• any other class or file.

#Module Directory Structure

Default convention:

module-src/
    Console/
        Commands/
    Contracts/
    Events/
    Exceptions/
    Helpers/
    Http/
        |-- Controllers/
        |-- Middleware/
        |-- Requests/
        |-- Resources/
    Jobs/
    Listeners/
    Models/
    Providers/
        |-- ModuleServiceProvider.php
        |-- EventServiceProvider.php
    Services/
    resources/
        |-- assets/
        |-- config/
            |-- module.php
        |-- database/
            |-- migrations/
            |-- seeds/
        |-- lang/
        |-- routes/
            |-- api.php
            |-- web.php
        |-- views/
        |-- manifest.php

#Customization

One of Concord's main goals is to enable applications to easily customize the modules.

This can be achieved by:

• overriding/extending eloquent models,
• extending enums and/or changing their defaults,
• modifying form requests (thus validation) being used by existing forms/controllers,
• ignoring migrations if necessary,
• altering views,
• modifying/disabling routes,
• disabling event listener bindings

#Customizing Eloquent Models

Eloquent models are likely the most wanted targets when customizing a module.

Concord modules define an interface for every Eloquent model. If you want to extend a model you can tell concord to use another class for that interface:

concord()->registerModel(\Module\Contracts\Model::class, \App\ExtendedModel::class);

This results that if the model is used in a relation, the extended model class will be used even there.

For more details refer to the Concord Models Documentation.