api VS swagger-php

The composer.json and project configuration is lightened as much as possible: unused packages and classes are removed, platform-check is disabled, and classmap-authoritative is enabled.

Native PHP attributes allowed OpenAPI markup to be much more compact than in DocBlocks. The resulting openapi.yaml is created with swagger-php and used to test the API.

First, swagger-php generates openapi.yaml based on code attributes, and then the spectator checks API responses to match openapi specification. The popular L5-Swagger is redundant in this case, as it is based on the same swagger-php with the addition of Swagger UI.

I do this except use https://github.com/zircote/swagger-php for writing the open api spec. I can enter the Spatie Data Object classes into the parameters, responses, and properties. Like op said though, it's a lot of comments and stuff to keep updated. Entirely using reflection (or reflection plus ability to manually specify certain extra things) like you're talking about sounds great.

wagger-php is a php swagger annotation and parsing library which generates interactive OpenAPI documentation for your RESTful API using doctrine annotations. - GitHub - zircote/swagger-php

The second one is L5 Swagger, a popular package bringing Swagger PHP and Swagger UI to Laravel. We actually don't need Swagger PHP here, as it uses Doctrine annotations to generate OpenAPI definitions and we're going to manually write our own instead. We do need Swagger UI, however, and the package conveniently adapts it to work with Laravel (the -W option is simply here to also update related dependencies, to avoid conflicts).

It is possible that there is a library doing this already. I am not PHP coder so would like to avoid complex frameworks and stick with barebone solution doing only this Swagger/JSON stuff. For swagger, I decided to go with zircote/swagger-php. I would like my schema and model classes to have nice Swagger doc and at the same time I can use them to prepare objects to interact with the DB by loading/dumping from JSON.

Ah right, so you're building a (presumably REST) API and you want to generate docs for the endpoints from your code. Slightly different scenario to what I assumed. There are a couple of libraries to generate OpenAPI specs from source files, I think this is the main one https://github.com/zircote/swagger-php though FWIW I prefer to maintain my API specs separately from the code and use those to guide what I'm building, rather than 'tother way round.

I'm using this library to generate an open api 3 (swagger) yaml file. You add @OA markup to your doc blocks and then can have this generate a file or produce it on the fly. It's a bit sparse on documentation but is working really well with my MVC set up for a REST API I'm developing. https://github.com/zircote/swagger-php