Modules

A module is a PHP namespace. It can contain controllers, classes, view scripts, configuration, tests, as well as public assets such as images, CSS, and JavaScript. For example, if you have an e-commerce application, you could have a module for presenting and selling products, and another for administrators to create products and manage orders.

File and Directory Structure

Given a module named Application, here is the recommended structure:

Application/
    config/
        module.config.php
    public/
        images/
        css/
        js/
    src/
        Controller/
            ProductController.php
        Module.php
        <other classes>
    test/
        Controller/
            ProductControllerTest.php
    view/
        application/
            product/
                list.phtml
        layout/
            layout.phtml

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All module classes can be autoloaded by Composer by adding them as a namespace in composer.json:

"autoload": {
    "psr-4": {
        "Application\\": "module/Application/src/"
    }
}

This means that whenever you refer to a class in the Application namespace, PHP will look for it in the module/Application/src/ folder. A class named Application\Controller\ProductController would be found in the file module/Application/src/Controller/ProductController.php.

In addition to autoloading, the application needs to be aware that the Application namespace represents a module. This is accomplished by adding it to the module configuration of the application in config/modules.config.php:

return [
    'Application',
    // other modules
];

Listeners

Each module has a Module class, which can contain a variety of methods called listeners. These listeners are called by laminas-modulemanager to configure the module.

For the namespace Application, the module manager will look for Application\Module. Here is a simple example that loads a module-specific configuration file:

namespace Application;

class Module
{
    public function getConfig(): array
    {
        /** [@var](https://github.com/var) array $config */
        $config = include __DIR__ . '/../config/module.config.php';
        return $config;
    }
}

getModuleDependencies()

Checks each module to verify whether all the modules it depends on were loaded. Each of the values returned by the method is checked against the loaded modules list: if one of the values is not in that list, a Laminas\ModuleManager\Exception\MissingDependencyModuleException is thrown.

namespace Application;

use Laminas\ModuleManager\Feature\DependencyIndicatorInterface;

class Module implements DependencyIndicatorInterface
{
    public function getDependencies(): array
    {
        return [
            'Product'
        ];
    }
}

// Add other methods following the same structure as getModuleDependencies()

Be sure to read about Best Practices when Creating Modules.