Features

Middleware Types

Expressive allows you to compose applications out of pipeline and routed middleware.

Pipeline middleware is middleware that defines the workflow of your application. These generally run on every execution of the application, and include such aspects as:

• Error handling
• Locale detection
• Session setup
• Authentication and authorization

Routed middleware is middleware that responds only to specific URI paths and HTTP methods. As an example, you might want middleware that only responds to HTTP POST requests to the path /users.

Expressive allows you to define middleware using any of the following:

• PSR-15 middleware instances.
• PSR-15 request handler instances.
• Service names resolving to one of the above middleware types.
• Callable middleware that implements the PSR-15 MiddlewareInterface signature.
• Middleware pipelines expressed as arrays of the above middleware types.

PSR-15 middleware

The PSR-15 specification covers HTTP server middleware and request handlers that consume PSR-7 HTTP messages. Expressive accepts both middleware that implements the MiddlewareInterface and request handlers that implement RequestHandlerInterface. As an example:

use Psr\Http\Server\MiddlewareInterface;
use Psr\Http\Server\RequestHandlerInterface;
use Psr\Http\Message\ResponseInterface;
use Psr\Http\Message\ServerRequestInterface;

class SomeMiddleware implements MiddlewareInterface
{
    public function process(ServerRequestInterface $request, RequestHandlerInterface $handler) : ResponseInterface
    {
        // do something and return a response, or
        // delegate to another request handler capable
        // of returning a response via:
        //
        // return $handler->handle($request);
    }
}

You could also implement such middleware via an anonymous class.

Callable middleware

Sometimes you may not want to create a class for one-off middleware. As such, Expressive allows you to provide a PHP callable that uses the same signature as Psr\Http\Server\MiddlewareInterface:

use Psr\Http\Server\RequestHandlerInterface;
use Psr\Http\Message\ResponseInterface;
use Psr\Http\Message\ServerRequestInterface;

function (ServerRequestInterface $request, RequestHandlerInterface $handler) : ResponseInterface
{
    // do something and return a response, or
    // delegate to another request handler capable
    // of returning a response via:
    //
    // return $handler->handle($request);
}

One note: neither argument require a typehint, and examples throughout the manual will omit the typehints when demonstrating callable middleware.

Service-based middleware

We encourage the use of a dependency injection container for providing your middleware. As such, Expressive also allows you to use service names for both pipeline and routed middleware. Generally, service names will be the specific middleware class names, but can be any valid string that resolves to a service.

When Expressive is provided a service name for middleware, it internally decorates the middleware in a Zend\Expressive\Middleware\LazyLoadingMiddleware instance, allowing it to be loaded only when dispatched.

Middleware pipelines

Expressive allows any pipeline or routed middleware to be self-contained middleware pipelines. To prevent the need for instantiating a Zend\Stratigility\MiddlewarePipe instance when defining the pipeline, Expressive allows you to provide an array of middleware:

// Pipeline middleware:
$app->pipe([
    FirstMiddleware::class,
    SecondMiddleware::class,
]);

// Routed middleware:
$app->get('/foo', [
    FirstMiddleware::class,
    SecondMiddleware::class,
]);

The values in these arrays may be any valid middleware type as defined in this chapter.