README

What Is It?

Hoard is a caching library.

Hoard's goal are:

• To be totally independant from any other framework.
• To be PSR-6: Cache (more information here) compliant so that it should work with any modern framework.
• Support multiple adapters for storage (like memcached).
• Support multiple discreet pools, and nested pools.
• Provide a way to automate actions with a script that is easy to use and version controlled with the application.
• A command line utility to run these scripts.

Basic Usage

Pools are Classes

You may follow the PSR-6 standard explicitely for getting and setting items in the cache. However there are some code requirements for you to be able to create the physical pool.

Each pool is represented by a concrete class that extends \Hoard\AbstractPool. Nested pools will be class that extend their parent pool class, not \Hoard\AbstractPool.

Pool names translate directly and both ways between the class name. With the following examples (pool name => class name):

• my_pool => MyPool
• parent.child_pool => Parent\ChildPool

Pools are located in a specific namespace provided by \Hoard\CacheManager::getNamespace(), which as of the writing of this document, is \Hoard\Hoard\Pool. Extending from the above examples;

• my_pool => \HoardPool\MyPool
• parent.child_pool => \HoardPool\Parent\ChildPool

Never instantiate the classes themselfs. You must use the CacheManager to retrieve the pool instances.

try {
    $pool = \Hoard\CacheManager::getPool('my.pool');
}
catch(\Hoard\NoSuchPoolException $e) {
    // deal with this appropriately
}

Storing and Retrieving

Once you have the pool instance (from the previous example), you can:

$item = $pool->getItem('key');
if($item->isHit()) {
    echo "Got: {$item->get()}";
}
else {
    echo "Item {$item->getKey()} is not in the cache.";
}    

Regardless of whether the item was stored in the cache previously, you save data to the cache the same way:

$item->set('myvalue')

There is an optional second argument for set() that allows you to specify a expiry time:

These will never expire (default):

$item->set('myvalue');       
$item->set('myvalue', null);

This will expire in 1 hour from now:

$item->set('myvalue', 3600);

This will expire at the specific timestamp:

$item->set('myvalue', new \DateTime('4th March 2015'));

Clearing Cache

To delete a single item from a pool:

$pool->getItem('key')->delete();

You may want to drop an entire pool:

$pool->clear();

Using a Cache Script

A hoard script is just a text file (the extension is not important, although .txt is the easiest to use) which specifies targets and commands that can be run from a command line utility.

The syntax is similar to a Makefile, targets have dependencies, except that indentation can be any white space before a command.

Run targets like you would a Makefile, through the ./g script:

./g hoard mytarget

Syntax

Pool names are important because they link directly to concrete classes, trying to perform any action on a pool that doesn't exist will result in an exception (the script will stop execution and return a non 0 exit code).

Drop an entire pool (and all of its child pools):

drop my.pool_name

Drop individual keys inside a pool:

drop my.pool:key1,key2,key3

Comments are any line, or part of a line that comes after a #:

# this is a comment
drop my.pool_name # this is also fine

Full Example

# my cool script
safe_drop:
    # this are items that may be safely dropped at any time and should be
    # dropped with any change to the software
    drop page:homepage

release: safe_drop
    # should be run with every production release

Running the release target like this:

$ ./g hoard release
Running target 'safe_drop'
  drop page:homepage... Done
Success.
Running target 'release'
  Nothing to do.
Success.

The ./g hoard command runs the script located at install-script/hoard.txt.

Mocking a Pool

There is a \Hoard\PoolTestCase you can use to generate mocked pools that have prepopulated data. This is easier than trying to do it in other ways.

class MyTest extends \Hoard\PoolTestCase
{

    public function testMockingPool()
    {
        // create mock
        $pool = $this->getMockedPool(array(
            'mykey' => 'myvalue'
        ));

        // found item
        $item = $pool->getItem('mykey');
        $this->assertEquals($item->get(), 'myvalue');
        $this->assertTrue($item->isHit());

        // not found item
        $item = $pool->getItem('mykey2');
        $this->assertFalse($item->isHit());
    }

}