Using push queues to send emails offers significant benefits to your application. It boosts application performance which in turn improves the user experience which in one way or another generally leads to a more successful application.
Confide, being built specifically for Laravel 4, has its own mail method that handles translation among other things. This mail method is used for common user account emails such as account confirmation, password resets, etc. With that in mind, to use push queues with with Confide you will need to override the sendEmail() method.
To override the Confide sendEmail() method open up User.php that you created (or edited) when installing Confide and add the following code.
After saving this file, your application will now use a push queue to send user account emails.
Push queues are the all the hype at the moment. However, I have not seen much discussion around securing them. Thats likely do the the simplicity of securing the receiving route, but either way…lets cover it.
There are two basic ways to secure the receiving route.
SSL – Use a security certificate to secure the connection.
Token and Route Filter – Build a route filter that requires a valid token.
Route Filter & Route Example
Configure the subscriber URL on iron.io to look something like the following. In this example the URL query string is set to the value of the iron.io token in app/config/queue.php.
Edit: I have updated the “Correct Service Provider” with code provided by William Cahill-Manley in his comments. Thanks for the contribution William!
Watching Laravel 4 grow has been spectacular. Its great to see so many libraries building service providers and facades for Laravel to make them feel more native to the framework. That said, I have noticed small but troubling trend with some packages available for Laravel.
The Problem
The problem lies in how configuration is handled for the package. Configuration should not be done within the service provider. This concept is not unique to Laravel. However, for this post I will be discussing Laravel packages specifically. Below is simple example of one such package.
At a glance, this file doesn’t appear to require configuration. If you look deeper (or refer to the documentation) you will find the developer can change the geocoding provider and adapter used for geocoding services. The ability to pick which geocoding provider and adapter to use is tremendous in allowing developers to build applications to do exactly what they want. The problem lies in the implementation of such configuration.
As you can see above, to use a different geocoding provider and/or adapter the developer must adjust the service provider to instantiate an alternate geocoding provider and/or adapter. Let’s say the package receives an update and the developer pulls down that update via composer. What happens to the “configuration”? It gets wiped out. Now the application is broken and the developer must update the service provider again. Wash. Rinse. Repeat.
The Solution
To solve this issue the package should (and now does) implement a publishable configuration file. The configuration file allows the developer to specify which geocoding provider and adapter to use for geocoding services.
So what do the new service provider and configuration look like? Take a look.
Now you may ask, “How do you configure this package?”
Simple. Run the following command after installing the package via composer.
After the configuration has been published the developer can edit it to use the geocoding provider and adapter of their choice. The published configuration file will allow the developer to update via composer without worrying about breaking their application (from a configuration stand point at least).
Summary
Configurable packages are a great thing. That said, let’s wear our “best practice hats” and make sure we keep the configuration out of Composers reach.