A while ago I wrote an article called . I received a lot of good feedback from it. But that article was about an internal admin panel tool which the user would choose which tenant they wanted to manipulate. Recently I started working on a new project where the authenticated user belongs to a specific tenant and should be allowed to extract data only from his own database. This article is the approach I took to achieve that. Simple Multi Tenant with Laravel 1- Every story starts with a Test: PostsTest Letting the tests drive my code became a passion for me. Multi Tenant should not be different. First we lay down how we want our test to look like and then we make the code happen. This is a pretty simple and fair test to expect. In order to make it work, the first requirement is to have setting up the tenant. But before we dive into that, let’s quickly write our helper. TenantTestCase create This was a clean and brilliant idea by Jeffrey Way on his awesome Let’s Build a Forum. Check it out on Laracasts . 2- TenantTestCase From the test we can expect that the class will be responsible for creating a new , a new and that user. A database-specific connection should also be set. TenantTestCase company user authenticating By using , the database should be migrated automatically. The call to will establish the authentication. As for the , since a user belongs to a company, it should recursively resolve that dependency. RefreshDatabase main actingAs User Factory 3- The Factories The will be responsible for creating a new user for us. Laravel’s default UserFactory is almost good enough, we just need to add the field to it. UserFactory company_id Once a new user is required to be created, Laravel will try to resolve the CompanyFactory. Let’s write that next. The is the moment where a new company comes to life for our tests, so I decided to leverage it to automatically setup the tenant database connection as expected by the . CompanyFactory PostsTest The last factory is the PostFactory. For organization purpose, I decided to move all my main factories into and make room for my tenant factories at . The PostFactory is incredibly simple. database/factories/main database/factories/tenant 3- The tenant_connect() and tenant_migrate() helpers As their name clearly suggests, will establish a database connection with the tenant database. Since this is the Test stage, we should make sure that the tenant database receives it’s own migrations, such as the posts table. tenant_connect() This file could be placed under . Don’t forget to add it to composer autoload. database/helpers.php "autoload": {"classmap": ["database/seeds","database/factories"],"files": ["database/helpers.php"],"psr-4": {"App\\": "app/"}} That brings us to the next topic: Migrations. 4- The Main Migrations The default folder will hold the database structure for the main connection (users and companies). We need to create the migration and tweak the to accommodate a field. database/migrations Companies Users company_id Creating the companies migration manually with the name will place it before the migration, which will prevent any foreign key conflict since the companies table should already exist for the users table to be created. 2014_10_12_000000_create_companies_table.php users 5- The Tenant Migrations On item (3) we established a method that will use the folder as the source for the tenant database structure. Let’s create our migration there. tenant_migrate() database/migrations_tenant create_posts_table This concludes all the migrations necessary. Next, we need to deal with the application database settings and the connections for the Models. 6- The Application Database Settings For database connection, let’s reuse the same strategy applied in the previous article: a and a database. Special attention to the new connection pointing to . Another point of interest is the variable that will allow us to switch between SQLite and MySQL between tests and live application. main tenant default main DB_DRIVER Since we’re talking about database settings, let’s take a moment to setup the file. The file should contain these variables phpunit.xml <env name="DB_DRIVER" value="sqlite"/><env name="DB_CONNECTION" value="main"/><env name="DB_DATABASE" value=":memory:"/> 7- The Models The models also need to be split between and models. Let’s create the and the under namespace. Tenant Main MainModel TenantModel App/Models Tables on the main connection, such as Companies and Users should extend MainModel whereas the Posts table is part of the customer-specific database structure and should extend TenantModel. Personally, I use the namespaces and respectively. App\Models\Main App\Models\Tenant 7- The Route Since the focus of the article is to talk about Tenancy, let’s not waste time talking about routing. That’s it! The test should now pass. 8- Wrapping up We started with a test that creates a Post and hit an endpoint to see if it gets returned. But before the test gets executed, the method on is invoked.The Tenant Test Case class will create a user, which belongs to a company. During the creation of that company, a new database connection will be established and a migration will run through the helper. Once all that is done, the Tenant Test Case class will have a user that will be given as authenticated.Once the endpoint is called, a tenant database has been created and a connection has been established. By using the model that has a default connection pointing to it will automatically fetch the records from the connected database. setUp TenantTestCase tenant_migrate() /posts Post tenant All that gives us a successful test implemented. But what about the actual application? 9- The Tenant Middleware The test is green, but the actual application doesn’t work. The reason for that is because the Tests are setting up a tenant connection, but the application isn’t. We can solve that by implementing a Tenant Middleware. This article is not going to implement any kind of authentication system. Whether you use Session, Cookies or Token is somewhat irrelevant. Let’s focus on the relevant part. You can imagine a middleware before this one established an authentication with a specific user. Now we just grab that user and connect to it’s company. For this last piece of the puzzle to properly work we need to: A) Register the Middleware in the Route B) Create the User Belongs to Company relationship C) Expose a method from the Company model. connect A) and B) are extremely simple: For C) we’re going to do 2 things: Check if a connection is already established and, if not, call . tenant_connect() 10- Conclusion I chose the strategy of presenting a simple test code as a starting point and make it work layer by layer. It presents a complete solution with Tests, Migrations and a small tenant-specific feature. You can see the whole project on . Did I forget to include any must-have feature in this article? Tell me about it either in the section below or on ! GitHub Twitter If you wanna know how I deal with application, check out . Data Migrations on a Multi Tenant this article Follow me on Medium for more articles like this. See you next time!

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