Installation

StaticPHP Core is the framework as a library. It is the package an application depends on, and it is installed with composer:

composer require 4apps/staticphp-core

Everything it ships lives under the StaticPHP\ namespace, resolved by PSR-4 from the package’s src/ directory, so composer’s autoloader finds it with no further setup.

Requirements

composer.json requires:

• PHP 8.4 or newer, and below 9 - the constraint is >=8.4 <9
• ext-intl
• ext-mbstring
• ext-pdo

Composer refuses to install the package without them, so there is nothing to check by hand.

Optional dependencies

Everything else the package can use is declared under suggest rather than require, with one entry per class that needs it. suggest is advisory: composer prints the list after an install and composer suggest prints the same table, but it downloads nothing, so an installation is only ever as heavy as the application asks for.

Needed by	Install
Load::view() with templates	twig/twig
Tables\Output\Excel	phpoffice/phpspreadsheet
Sessions\SessionsMongoDb	mongodb/mongodb
Cache\CacheRedis, SessionsRedis	ext-redis
Cache\CacheMemcached, SessionsMemcached	ext-memcached
Cache\CacheApcu, SessionsApcu	ext-apcu
Fv::translit(), Fv::setFriendly()	ext-iconv
Postgres, incl. SessionsPgsql and migrations	ext-pdo_pgsql
MySQL/MariaDB, incl. migrations	ext-pdo_mysql
SQLite, incl. migrations	ext-pdo_sqlite

A missing one is a fatal error at the point of use, not a silent fallback. Twig is the exception, and the next section covers it. What each of the rest costs when it is absent is on the pages that describe them: caching, sessions, Excel output and the migration drivers.

Twig is a suggestion, not a requirement

Twig 3.0 or newer is listed under suggest, not require. Composer’s files autoload is eager: twig plus the symfony polyfills it pulls in contribute seven files entries, which come to nine php files at runtime, and every one of them is required on every request whether or not a template is ever rendered. The measurement is on running without Twig; the suggest text in composer.json still says eight and is out of date. Leaving the library out of an api-only application’s dependencies is what removes that cost - lazy class loading alone would not.

If the application renders templates, require it explicitly:

composer require twig/twig:^3.0

Without twig installed the view engine is simply not built, Load::view() falls back to plain php templates, and the registerTwig() helpers return quietly. If the library is installed but a particular application should not use it, $config['disable_twig'] = true skips building the environment.

Relationship to gintsmurans/staticphp

This package is the library. The application skeleton - the demo app, the asset pipeline, the dev container, the staticphp cli - lives in gintsmurans/staticphp and is what composer create-project gives you.

Starting a new project from that skeleton is the usual route; composer require is for adding the framework to an application that already exists, or for building the application tree by hand. The skeleton section documents it: what create-project hands you, the cli, presets, the asset pipeline, the docker environment, and how to pick up a later skeleton release in a project you have already started.

Releases and contributing

In the repository, master is the latest released code, develop is where development happens and where pull requests are based, and tags are releases. CONTRIBUTING.md covers the docker workflow and what CI enforces; CHANGELOG.md is the release history.

2.0 is the release that turned the framework into this package, and it is breaking throughout. An application on 1.x has a list to work through before composer require is even the right command - see upgrading to 2.0.

Next

Nothing runs yet. A front controller has to say where the application is before the framework can boot - see the front controller.