Events

Events in Bullet allow you to intercept and modify requests before they hit your application, and alter responses after your application sends them, but before they are sent to the browser or user. Events can be used anytime you need to apply a global behavior to your application when it meets certain conditions.

Events can be useful for injecting custom responses on specific status codes, like serving a custom “File Not Found” page every time a 404 HTTP status is sent by your application. They can also be used for things like decoding a request body a custom way or performing user authentication checks if a cookie or HTTP Auth headers are present.

Named Events

Fixed event names that are always fired in a bullet request/response cycle.

  • before - Before any route handler is matched or executed
  • after - After the last route handler is executed and the response is ready to be sent

Dynamic Events

Dynamic events are dependent upon the response being sent from your application, and are fired just before the after event.

  • [http_status_code] - Like 404, or 500, etc.
  • [response_format] - Like html, json, xml, etc.
  • [exception_class] - Exception class name like InvalidArgumentException. Every exception also triggers the base Exception event that you can use to handle all exceptions, and set the HTTP response status to 500 by default.

Specific Examples

Here are a few examples to get you started with event handling:

Serving Custom 404 Pages

This example injects the contents of a custom errors/404 template into the response every time the application sends a 404 error.

use Bullet\Request;
use Bullet\Response;
 
$app->on(404, function(Request $request, Response $response) use($app) {
    $response->content($app->template('errors/404')->content());
});
 

This example uses templates and may require some configuration.

Capture and log Exceptions

Exceptions are unique to other events because instead of only a request and response object getting passed, a third argument is passed - the Exception object. This example displays Exceptions in a nice format, and logs them to Sentry when in production.

use Bullet\Request;
use Bullet\Response;
 
// Display exceptions with error and 500 status
$app->on('Exception', function(Request $request, Response $response, \Exception $e) use($app, $raven) {
    if($request->format() === 'json') {
        $response->content(array(
            'exception' => get_class($e),
            'message' => $e->getMessage()
        ));
    } else {
        $response->content($app->template('errors/exception', array('e' => $e))->content());
    }
 
    if(BULLET_ENV == 'production') {
        // Log Exception to Sentry
        $raven->captureException($e);
    }
});
 
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