Recently I was in the process of migrating a Magento webshop to a SaaS webshop solution. Normally I would access the product and other data by using the API. In this case this was a problem as there was a lot of data that I was not able to access. I needed the output of blocks and some custom modules which where not exposed to the API.
I had 2 options:
Write code to expose those data to the API.
Access the data from Laravel.
As I already needed Laravel for this specific project I tried the second approach. From this point there are 2 possible paths: Access the data directly in the database, or access the Magento code base and access the data that way. The latter has my preference as blocks needs parsing before I can transfer them. For example, an image is saved in the database in this way:
<img title="image404" src="{{media url="wysiwyg/404.jpg'}}" alt="Page not found" />
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Preparation
Before we can get to the fun stuf we need some preparation. For this approach to work we need 2 environments: a working Laravel environment and a working Magento environment. You don't need to be able to access the Magento environment from the webbrowser, this can be Headless™. You could even connect the environment to the production database if you wanted to, but I would not recommend that. The 2 installations must be on the same system as we need to include the Magento source files into Laravel. My setup look something like this:
/Root -- /Laravel -- /Magento
Magento and Laravel has an overlap in 2 functions which will give you a fatal error: __() and now(). As I don't need that functions I commented them out in staging/app/code/core/Mage/Core/functions.php.
Service Provider
The most logical approach for this is to use a service provider which binds to the container. This way Magento is only bootstrapped when you actually need the data and not on every request. I did add this Service Provider:
namespace App\Providers;
use Illuminate\Support\ServiceProvider;
class MagentoServiceProvider extends ServiceProvider
{
/**
* Bootstrap services.
*
* @return void
*/
public function boot()
{
//
}
/**
* Register services.
*
* @return void
*/
public function register()
{
$this->app->bind('Magento', function () {
require_once '../../path-to-your-magento-installation/app/Mage.php';
return \Mage::app();
});
}
}
Now we can access the block contents in the same way we normally would do when working in Magento:
app('Magento');
$blockid = 'main-image-404-page';
$layout = \Mage::app()->getLayout();
$block = $layout->createBlock('cms/block')->setBlockId($blockid)->toHtml()
How safe is this?
I did test this only in a closed environment. I made a copy of the Magento code and database and setup a local copy. I then transferred the data to the new SaaS webshop which was not online yet.
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