#Minotar-PHP

As much as we'd like it to be, if you've used Minotar for a length of time, you'll know that it isn't the most reliable service, out-of-the-box. After all, it is a free service, and is used by some of the most popular Minecraft sites on the net, so it takes a good bit of load.

This is a nice, not-too fussy package for handling the display of Minotars on your site with caching, so that whenever your site is up, you should be able to display Minotars.

###Installation

This comes as a Composer package. Composer is an awesome tool for managing your dependencies in PHP projects; you should definitely start using it, if you aren't already! Simply adding the follow lines to your composer.json...

    "require": {
        "minotar/minotar-php": "dev-master",
    },

Example

This is a basic example, showing how one would cache Minotars to your server, and define a page to serve them off of.

minotar.php

<?php
require 'vendor/autoload.php';

// And the "adapter" to use for caching. This should be called *before* the encoder,
// as some encoders need an adapter in their DI
Minotar\Minotar::adapter('file', your/cache/directory');
// First, we want to set the "encoder" to use for display...
Minotar\Minotar::encoder('url', 'http://example.com/serve.php');
// Set the cache to exist for 60 minutes
Minotar\Minotar::config(array('time' => 60));

index.php

include('minotar.php');

Minotar\Minotar::avatar('connor4312');

serve.php

include('minotar.php');
// To serve requests, it's just a different encoder!
Minotar\Minotar::encoder('server');

// Note: it is important that *nothing*, not even a blank line, is send before this
Minotar\Minotar::get(@$_GET['minotar'])->send();

Not too hard, eh? Read on for some more fun and advanced usage.

##Components The three primary components of minotar-php are the adapters, encoders, and the MinotarDisplay itself. These are accessed through a facade, Minotar\Minotar that passes off appropriate calls.

Minotar::adapter

Minotar::adapter($name, $arguments...) is actually a proxy to desarrolla2/Cache adapters.

First you pass in the name, such as "file", or "mongo", to give some examples (see the full list on the package's Github page). If you pass in additional arguments, these will be given to the constructor of the cache. Calling Minotar::adapter('file', '/directory') is the equivalent of saying $adapter = new File($cacheDir);

After you call this function, subsequent MinotarDisplays that are made will use the formed adapter. Minotar::adapter also returns the adapter, allowing you to add additional options or make changes if needed. Again, see the documentation on the Cache package if you're interested in that.

Minotar::encoder

Minotar::encoder($name, $arguments...) is similar in construction to the adapter(). MinotarDisplays use the last formed adapter, and an instance of the adapter is returned. This essentially defines how images will be displayed on your site.

• Minotar::encoder('url', 'http://example.com/path/to/serve.php') - Using the "url" adapter tells Minotar that you are caching and want to serve the images locally, off the given URL.
• Minotar::encoder('raw') - Using the "raw" encoder will simply cause the default Minotar URL to be displayed.
• Minotar::encoder('datauri') - Using the "datauri" encoder causes Minotars to be, expected, displayed as Data URIs. This may be useful in some cases, and is quite easy to set up. The primary disadvantage is that the client's browser will not cache the displayed Minotars. It may be desirable to use in some cases, such as displaying many small Minotars, for example.
• Minotar::encoder('server') - The server encoder is a bit of a special one. It returns a Symfony/HttpFoundation response with the requested image, and caching headers built-in to tell the user's browser to cache the Minotar. This is designed to be used in tandem with the "url" encoder (see the example above).

Closing Remarks

Feel free to read through the code if you'd like a better understanding of what's happening. Fork, share, use, and contribute.

Extending

This package is fairly extensible. It's build around illuminate/container for its dependency injection. For example, you can inject your own custom encoders or adapters if you want to (or contribute them here!), via Minotar::app(). Few things are bound tightly; you can inject any of your own components to minotar-php pretty easily.

Contributing

To contribute:

• Document your code
• Unit test for any changed functionality/bugfixes
• Please follow PSR-2