Phpactor is a monolith

Last modified 2022/09/14 11:14

Phpactor is a monolith with some exceptions. Over 20 packages have been imported into the main repo and their github repositories abandoned.

This should make development far easier going forward.

Background

You may have heard me tell this story before. Hopefully this will be the last time I tell it.

When I started Phpactor in 2015 I had just read “principles of package design”, and wanting to be a good developer, I decided to architect Phpactor as a set of decoupled packages, in general there would be four classes of package:

  • Domain package: a package defining the interfaces and business model for the functionality.
  • Extension package: a package which provides an integration point to the framework (in this case Phpactor). Basically a DI extension which hooks up the domain and knows how to pull in implementations.
  • Implementation/bridge package: if required, a package which bridges the domain to an actual implementation.
  • Extension package for the implementation/bridge package: the package which provides the DI extension which will be consumed by the extension package.

So, potentially, for every “domain” in Phpactor there were up to 4 packages. In theory this was amazingly powerful:

  • You could mix and match extensions to build new distributions of Phpactor.
  • External Phpactor extensions could depend on only what the needed, instead of the whole of Phpactor.
  • Domain boundaries were very explicit, it helped to ensure code was decoupled.
  • You could add new implementations without touching either the domain or domain extension.
  • You could integrate the package with other frameworks (e.g. Symfony) without depending on the Phpactor “framework”.

In reality, very few of these advantages paid off and as the number of packages grew, the time to develop and iterate Phpactor grew, adding a feature would often take me an entire weekend, and I was adding lots of features for a long time until it just got depressing.

About 3 years ago I tried to create a mono repo using an automated package split which preserved the commit history, but it was heavy and complicated.

Then I tried to minimise the overhead of managing “satellite” repositories with maestro and then maestro2. Both were useful temporarily (highlight being migrating 50 repos to PHP 8.0 using rector), but the overhead of using these tools was non-zero, and it was an additional thing to worry about.

So I put this off for a long time because:

  • I didn’t want to lose the benefits of the decoupled packages.
  • I didn’t want to lose the git history
  • I couldn’t choose a strategy to merge all these repos into one.

Monolith

Over the past two weekends I’ve been given this more thought, motivated by the fact that there are a huge number of PHP 8.1 deprecations which I didn’t want to fix in 50 separate packages.

To cut a story short I:

  • Preserved worse-reflection, ampfs-watch and the continer packages and their dependencies.
  • Moved all the rest to the main phpactor/phpactor package.

I wrote a script to do the heavy lifting:

  • The contents of each packages src directory was copied into the Phpactor src/<package name> directory.
  • The contents of each packages tests directory was copied into the Phpactor src/<package name>/Tests directory.

As phpactor/phpactor maps the autoloader from Phpactor\\ this structure matches the autoloader exactly.

Downsides

  • No hard boundaries between packages: It’s now easy to violate package boundaries, although this can be fixed with some tooling.
  • Tests in new location: Having the Tests in the src directory didn’t feel great. My usual strategy is to have tests/{Unit,Integration,Benchmarks}, but a single package can belong to all of those categories. I could also have had tests/{packageName}/{Unit,Integration,Benchamarks} but this means adding lots of explicit mappings to the autoloader.
  • No commit history: We also lost all the commit history for all of these files.
  • Extensions: The 3 extant Phpactor extensions depend on the individual packages. For now phpactor/phpactor replaces them. Going forward they will need to depend on the monolith.
  • Package level metadata: Package-level README files and other meta files are gone, but on the plus side tooling configuration is now global.

Upsides

  • Easy refactoring: No need to do the same work in 50 repositories.
  • Easier to contribute: Most of the code is right there in phpactor/phpactor. I would think many features and imrovements would require a single PR.
  • Centralised tooling: No more upgrade PHPUnit on 50 repositories, and easy to maintain the same coding standard.

Archived

The following packages have been archived and are now part of phpactor/phpactor:

✓ Archived repository phpactor/class-mover
✓ Archived repository phpactor/class-to-file-extension
✓ Archived repository phpactor/code-builder
✓ Archived repository phpactor/code-transform
✓ Archived repository phpactor/code-transform-extension
✓ Archived repository phpactor/completion
✓ Archived repository phpactor/completion-extension
✓ Archived repository phpactor/completion-rpc-extension
✓ Archived repository phpactor/completion-worse-extension
✓ Archived repository phpactor/composer-autoloader-extension
✓ Archived repository phpactor/config-loader
✓ Archived repository phpactor/console-extension
✓ Archived repository phpactor/debug-extension
✓ Archived repository phpactor/extension-manager-extension
✓ Archived repository phpactor/file-path-resolver
✓ Archived repository phpactor/file-path-resolver-extension
✓ Archived repository phpactor/indexer-extension
✓ Archived repository phpactor/language-server-extension
✓ Archived repository phpactor/language-server-phpactor-extensions
✓ Archived repository phpactor/logging-extension
✓ Archived repository phpactor/name
✓ Archived repository phpactor/path-finder
✓ Archived repository phpactor/php-extension
✓ Archived repository phpactor/reference-finder
✓ Archived repository phpactor/reference-finder-extension
✓ Archived repository phpactor/reference-finder-rpc-extension
✓ Archived repository phpactor/rpc-extension
✓ Archived repository phpactor/source-code-filesystem
✓ Archived repository phpactor/source-code-filesystem-extension
✓ Archived repository phpactor/worse-reference-finder-extension
✓ Archived repository phpactor/worse-reference-finder
✓ Archived repository phpactor/worse-reflection-extension