How to Log Events in Your PHP Application and Show them in a Cool Way - PHP Stats Graphs package blog

Contents

Installation

Configuration (optional)

How it works?

Running the examples

Online Demonstration

Conclusion

Installation

First we need to install the PHP Stats package. The most recommended way is to use the composer tool and add this package in the list of packages to install for your projects. 

You can go to the package from here and check the download section tab for installation with the composer tool directly from the PHP Classes site own Composer repository. You can also follow the instructions you can find in the README.md file.

Configuration (optional)

You can have a configuration file in order to setup the library so it knows where it can store a database file to store the data to appear in the charts, as well other configuration values. You can copy the distribution file config-stats-base.yml.dist to the root of your project with the name config-stats-base.yml

This file has the following values:

database:
    driver: pdo_sqlite
    path: "%project_dir%/app/cache/simple_stats.sqlite"
    charset: UTF8
models:
    - clicks
    - ips
    - logins

The database key configures how the SQLite will be used. The models key defines the details  about the events we want to register.

Any change on any of these keys requires remove the SQLite database file in order for the package to recreates a new database file. For now no migration process is supported.

How it works?

This package generates charts in SVG format to show the output statistics.

The package provides a couple of scripts that you can start from terminal console.

This package can generate random data for demonstration purposes using a command class. In real applications you would have a command class to retrieve the real logged event data to be displayed in the charts.

This package uses a third party SVG library in order to render statistical data as graphical charts. For now are there are two types of available graphs:

Bar charts

Data values displayed as bars

Scatter

Data values with X reference (2D) with one or several dimensions

Running the examples

To show the examples you start PHP built-in server from the terminal console in the root folder of the project.

php -S localhost:8000

Now you can use your favorite browser and access http://localhost:8000/samples/index.html. For now there are only two examples. You will see the same data in the two types of charts.

Online Demonstration

Just to show how easy is to include this package in your own applications I have created a simple demo that you can find in separate github  repository.

You can see this package demonstration in action here.

Conclusion

As you may have understood, this package makes it easy to render nice graphs about data from logged events or other type of data source that you can build using your own custom command classes.

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