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As a package in an existing Laravel app

Getting a license

If you already have a Laravel 10 application, you can install Mixpost as a package inside it.

To install Mixpost, you'll need to get a license first.

Installation via Composer

First, add the packages.inovector.com repository to your composer.json.

"repositories": [
    {
        "type": "composer",
        "url": "https://packages.inovector.com"
    }
],

Next, you need to create a file called auth.json and place it either next to the composer.json file in your project or the composer home directory. Using this command, you can determine the composer home directory on *nix machines.

composer config --list --global | grep home

This is the content you should put in auth.json:

{
    "http-basic": {
        "packages.inovector.com": {
            "username": "<YOUR-MIXPOST.APP-ACCOUNT-EMAIL-ADDRESS-HERE>",
            "password": "<YOUR-LICENSE-KEY-HERE>"
        }
    }
}

To validate if Composer can read your auth.json you can run this command:

composer config --list --global | grep packages.inovector.com

If you did everything correctly, the above command should display your credentials. If that command doesn't display anything, verify that you created an auth.json as mentioned above.

With this configuration in place, you'll be able to install the package into your Laravel project using this command:

composer require inovector/mixpost-pro-team "^2.0"

After installing the Mixpost package, you may execute:

php artisan mixpost:install

To ensure that assets get republished each time Mixpost is updated, we strongly advise you to add the following command to the post-update-cmd of the scripts section of your composer.json.

"scripts": {
    "post-update-cmd": [
        "@php artisan mixpost:publish-assets --force=true"
    ]
}

Mixpost uses Job Batching and you should create a database migration to build a table to contain meta-information about your job batches.

If your application does not yet have this table, it may be generated using the:

php artisan queue:batches-table

Run the migrations with:

php artisan migrate

To make media files (images & videos) accessible from the web you should create a symbolic link from public/storage to storage/app/public

php artisan storage:link

You can publish the config file with:

php artisan vendor:publish --tag=mixpost-config

Mixpost has the ability to generate images from video while uploading a video file. This would not be possible without FFmpeg installed on your server. You need to follow FFmpeg installation instructions on their official website.

After installation, depending on the operating system, you need to set the ffmpeg_path and ffprobe_path in the Mixpost config file.

Default folder path: /usr/bin/. If FFmpeg is there, there is no need to change it.

/*
 * FFMPEG & FFProbe binaries paths, only used if you try to generate video thumbnails
 */
'ffmpeg_path' => env('FFMPEG_PATH', '/usr/bin/ffmpeg'),
'ffprobe_path' => env('FFPROBE_PATH', '/usr/bin/ffprobe'),

Or, you can set them in your .env file

FFMPEG_PATH=/usr/bin/ffmpeg
FFPROBE_PATH=/usr/bin/ffprobe

Error Reporting

Mixpost utilizes its unique internal exception handler rather than the default "App\Exceptions\ExceptionHandler". To integrate external error reporting tools with your Mixpost setup, you should use the "Mixpost::report" method. Generally, this method is called from the register method of your app's "App\Providers\AppServiceProvider" class:

use Inovector\Mixpost\Mixpost;
use Sentry\Laravel\Integration;

Mixpost::report(function($exception) {
   Integration::captureUnhandledException($exception);
});

Install Horizon

Mixpost handles various tasks in a queued way via Laravel Horizon. If your application doesn't have Horizon installed yet, follow their installation instructions.

After Horizon is installed, don't forget to set QUEUE_CONNECTION in your .env file to redis.

config/horizon.php should have been created in your project. In this config file, you must add a block named mixpost-heavy to both the production and local environment.

    'environments' => [
        'production' => [
            'supervisor-1' => [
                'maxProcesses' => 10,
                'balanceMaxShift' => 1,
                'balanceCooldown' => 3,
            ],
            'mixpost-heavy' => [
                'connection' => 'mixpost-redis',
                'queue' => ['publish-post'],
                'balance' => 'auto',
                'processes' => 8,
                'tries' => 1,
                'timeout' => 60 * 60,
            ],
        ],

        'local' => [
            'supervisor-1' => [
                'maxProcesses' => 3,
            ],
            'mixpost-heavy' => [
                'connection' => 'mixpost-redis',
                'queue' => ['publish-post'],
                'balance' => 'auto',
                'processes' => 3,
                'tries' => 1,
                'timeout' => 60 * 60,
            ],
        ],
    ],

In the config/queue.php file you must add the mixpost-redis connection:

'connections' => [

    // ...

   'mixpost-redis' => [
        'driver' => 'redis',
        'connection' => 'default',
        'queue' => env('REDIS_QUEUE', 'default'),
        'retry_after' => 11 * 60,
        'block_for' => null,
    ],

Don't forget to run php artisan horizon. In production, you need a way to keep your horizon processes running. For this reason, you need to configure a process monitor Supervisor that can detect when your horizon processes exit and automatically restart them.

Example of supervisor config:

[program:mixpost_horizon]
process_name=%(program_name)s
command=php /path-to-your-project/artisan horizon
autostart=true
autorestart=true
user=your_user_name
stopwaitsecs=3600

Schedule the commands

In the console kernel (app/Console/Kernel.php), you should schedule these commands:

protected function schedule(Schedule $schedule)
{
    // ...
    \Inovector\Mixpost\Schedule::register($schedule);
  
    $schedule->command('horizon:snapshot')->everyFiveMinutes();
    $schedule->command('queue:prune-batches')->daily();
}

Don't forget to add a cron that runs the scheduler:

* * * * cd /path-to-your-project && php artisan schedule:run >> /dev/null 2>&1

Visit the UI

After performing all these steps, you should be able to visit the Mixpost UI at /mixpost.

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