Elefant 2.2.4 released

[jbroadway]

Elefant 2.2.4 has been released with a number of bug fixes and improvements.

Click here to download or update.

Introducing JobQueue

This update adds a new JobQueue class which is powered by Pheanstalk/Beanstalkd. This makes it very easy to setup background workers and send tasks to them for processing.

Setup

To set it up, install Beanstalkd via your package manager of choice (apt/yum/brew/port), for example:

$ apt install beanstalkd

Next, after upgrading Elefant to 2.2.4, run Composer update from the root directory of your website to install the Pheanstalk library:

$ cd /path/to/www && composer update

Lastly, edit the [JobQueue] settings in your conf/config.php file to point to your Beanstalkd server:

[JobQueue]

backend = beanstalkd
host = 127.0.0.1
port = 11300

Usage

Sending a job to be done by a background worker is as easy as:

JobQueue::enqueue ('tube-name', ['data' => '...']);

Writing a worker in Elefant looks like this:

<?php // apps/myapp/handlers/worker.php

if (! $this->cli) exit;

$page->layout = false;

$worker = JobQueue::worker ();

$worker->watch ('tube-name');

while ($job = $worker->reserve ()) {
    $data = json_decode ($job->getData ());

    // Process job with $data

    $worker->delete ($job);
}

The above worker can be run via php index.php myapp/worker and can be initialized using your system scheduler, such as systemd.

Note that workers can be written in any language that connects to Beanstalkd and listens for jobs to process.

Other improvements

• Added User::require_verification() which extends User::require_login() to require email verification too
• Added Auto-include Composer autoloader to Site Settings form so you no longer need to include it manually in a bootstrap.php file

Click here for a full list of changes.