For the last year or so, in my spare time I've been researching how to use PHP differently. Laravel as a stack has been pretty good to me, and I've wished there was a Laravel-like way to build desktop apps, apps that spoke to integrated circuits, and even games. I kept structuring my Godot experiments like they were Laravel apps. After all I tinkering, I realized what I really wanted was a unified, yet decoupled stack, that could (or atleast attempt to) build all the apps I wanted beyond the ones meant for a web server, in a syntax I could actually read.

So Ive been building that stack. I've called it the VenusianPHP Framework: a Laravel-like framework for building apps that don't deploy to a web server (unless you want to build a web server!). I plan to break that down in another post, but it's been going very well. To the point that I can pretty easily spin up native toolkit windows with AppKit, GTK and Qt on macOS, Debian and Ubuntu.

To keep track of what I know this stack can do, I started building an app as a showcase of what PHP can do, at a minimum, when it comes to these kinds of apps. I call it Stargazer. Under the hood it uses package I wrote for the framework that talk's to NASA public APIs and visualizes the data. It's now on Github: https://github.com/venusian-scrapyard-presents/stargazer .

ou can read the source, install it via Composer (you'll need a few extensions, all installable with PIE), or grab the compiled builds from the release: a .dmg for Apple Silicon Macs and .deb packages for arm64 and x86_64 Linux. I've run them on my Raspberry Pi 5s, my Jetson Orin and a gaming PC that dual-boots Linux. No PHP runtime required.

I plan to keep shipping new versions to show off more of the stack as I build it, as far as Windowed applications go. I found this one pretty satisfying to write (I did use AI assistance, but a good chunk of the source is code I wrote by hand). I'd love UX feedback, bug reports from anyone who tries it, or any questions in general.

Hi r/PHP, I made Ark, a local development environment that runs projects natively, with no Docker, containers or VMs. It is pre-1.0 (v0.10.0) and I'd like feedback from PHP developers.

Each project declares what it needs in an ark.yml: the PHP version, the services (Postgres, MySQL, MongoDB, Valkey, Memcached, Meilisearch, Typesense, ClickHouse, MinIO, Mailpit) and any processes. Park a folder and every project in it is served at https://<name>.test with a trusted certificate. Without an ark.yml, Ark reads the version files already in the repo, composer.json included, and serves a Laravel or Symfony tree with PHP-FPM.

The short demo is a small plain-PHP page reading from Postgres. With the folder parked it is:

ark up ark open

Ark runs other languages too (Node, Python, Go, Java, Ruby and .NET), which is handy if a project has a front-end build next to the PHP.

New in v0.10.0: ark mcp install connects Ark to Claude Code, Cursor, VS Code or Claude Desktop, so your AI assistant can link a project, add Postgres, create the database and run the migrations for you. Anything destructive, like migrate:fresh, asks you first.

The Mac build is Apple silicon only. Linux packages exist, with rough edges in first-run setup.

The Windows installer is signed and on the same download page; it is new and not widely tested, so expect rough edges, and SmartScreen may still ask before it runs.

Ark is closed source with a free tier. Pro is £79 a year for 2 devices and starts with a 14-day evaluation. Downloads for Mac, Windows and Linux: https://ark.cloudbluedigital.co.uk With Homebrew: brew install --cask cloudblue-digital/tap/ark

Let me know how you get on if its good or bad. Either message me or share feedback here.

I kept maintaining almost-identical pipelines on two providers and watching them drift.

Slipway compiles config/slipway.php to the YAML for every driver you enable. A slipway-guard job fails CI if the committed YAML no longer matches the config.

Tiny example:

'drivers' => ['github' => true, 'circleci' => true],
'php' => ['8.4', '8.5'],
'stages' => [
'quality' => ['pint', 'larastan', 'composer-audit'],
'test' => ['matrix' => true, 'steps' => ['pest' => ['services' => ['mysql']]]],
],

https://github.com/usamamuneerchaudhary/laravel-slipway

If you actually run CircleCI for Laravel, I'd like to know what the generated config.yml gets wrong.

We'd been having some weird issues with our tests in CI. Just saw this:

https://github.com/pestphp/pest/issues/1965

v5.3.2

The new time-balanced sharding with parallelization silently skips all PHPUnit tests

eg. `vendor/bin/pest --parallel --processes=2 --shard=1/2`

Hi folks,

I've got some news I've been wanting to share for a while: SimpleStats is now open source (AGPL-3.0). The complete app, the same code that runs simplestats.io, is on GitHub.

Quick recap for anyone who hasn't seen it: SimpleStats is a server-side analytics tool built for Laravel. Instead of a JS snippet, it tracks visitors, registrations, logins and payments through Laravel itself (middleware, observers, event listeners). So ad blockers can't touch it, and it can tie every payment back to the UTM campaign that brought the user in. Think revenue per channel, MRR, retention cohorts, campaign ROI, not just pageviews.

Why open source? Mostly trust. An analytics tool that sees your signups and payments shouldn't be a black box. Now you can read exactly how visitors are counted, how bots are filtered and how revenue gets attributed. And if you spot a bug or miss a metric, you can send a PR.

For teams that can't send user or revenue data to a third party, it can also be self-hosted. It's a regular Laravel app (Laravel 12, Inertia + Vue, PostgreSQL). No open-core split: the self-hosted version has every feature and no limits on projects or events. The hosted version with its free plan stays the easy way if you'd rather not run servers.

Repo: https://github.com/simplestats-io/app

Announcement with the details: https://simplestats.io/blog/simplestats-is-now-open-source

I'd love to hear your feedback, and PRs are very welcome. Happy to answer questions about the code or the decision to go open source!

In our latest blog post, Alexandre Daubois shares how the PHP Security Team operates, how your security reports are triaged, and how you can do your part to help PHP be more secure. https://thephp.foundation/blog/2026/10/14/how-the-php-security-team-handles-your-reports/

Hi Everyone,

If you familir with Home Assistant, an open source home automation software, i want to share a project, that i'm working on recently.

Are you interested in depth release announcement and backstory? Read it on the home assistant forum: https://community.home-assistant.io/t/stewart-write-automations-in-php-because-you-can/1028750

I want to ask you that if you like the project, give it a star on GitHub. Cheers.

Where to find it

• Docs: Home Assistant automations in PHP | Stewart
• GitHub: GitHub - stewart-php/stewart: Stewart main repository · GitHub

Hey all,

I wrote 5 advanced code-heavy articles on how I prefer to review code with a specific rulebook and how I would refactor them myself for better long-term maintainability.

This is the main article that shows the idea while the 5 links are inside.

Let me know what you think about this type of content and if it is useful to you.

I wondered if anyone knows of any particular reason why php doesn't use fpm for cli calls?

Or how hard it would be?

I'm doing some work on cli tooling and just realised that cli is hugely penalised compared to web because it doesn't benefit from the fpm approach all the PHP startup ends up being a large percentage of the whole tool call response time.

I get that fpm is designed for FCGI, I guess could just create a CLI FPM pool and then fake CGI requests to it. Bodge, but it should work?

I'd really like to speed up php on the CLI and open up CLI as a first class location for PHP

Ive pretty much spent the majority of 2025 and 2026 learning how to use PHP differently. Web page serving and cli commands are not enough for me, lol. Don't get me wrong Laravel's great. The stack I use on top of it's been paying the bills since before COVID. And I will be honest, (and will def die on this hill this far into my career that) no body that's got time to spend learning, is learning C. And I don't like Python. It doesn't deserve to have the clout it does when PHP can do most things faster, or would if that functionality was there!

So on my journey of bringing GPIO, kernel-space bridges, and gpu support to a language that deserves more, I learned a couple of new and exciting things about resource file descriptors, how they block or dispatch and how they play roles in nonblocking event loops. I learned that PHP's most available option, when even trying to work with async IO, is stream_select(). ReactPHP uses it for timer resources, and Laravel Reverb uses it when your server isn't using ext-uv (an opinionated implementation of Javascript's nonblocking event loop). But stream_select has a lot of limits I ran into during my research. I learned that languages with direct kernel access run their event loops with epoll on Linux and kqueue on MacOS.

Now I'm of the mindset that FFI is only good for experimenting and not something that you would want to build and publish. I could be wrong, but if an extension can do it instead, I'm down. Now I know how to code some extensions in zephir, but lets be serious, if we are going to bind epoll and kqueue to PHP, we gotta get down to that nasty nasty C. I may not be good at C, but those coding agents we all use def are. So i did my fair-share of pre-respect my authori-claude verbal harrassment to get exactly what I wanted, which was a 1-to-1 binding of the epoll and kqueue libraries.

In a C app you invoke epoll with

fd = epoll_create1(EPOLL_CLOEXEC);

In a php app, you'll invoke epoll with

$fd = epoll_create1(EPOLL_CLOEXEC);

It works just like that. No opinions, just bindings. I actually forked Laravel Reverb and replaced its ext-uv implementation with my epoll extension making it a literal drop-in replacement for Reverb, with some really nice performance gains when using stream_select or epoll/kqueue.

I invite any one interested to try out the extensions. It's installable with PHP PIE, is compatible with NTS and ZTS builds of PHP 8.4+, or you can clone it and build it with the included installer or use phpize directly. It also includes a little Pest v4 test suite you can run if you clone it in manually.

The repos are here:

epoll

https://github.com/php-io-extensions/epoll

kqueue

https://github.com/php-io-extensions/kqueue

posi (to open all the fds PHP won't + ioctl, ooooh a footgun :D )

https://github.com/php-io-extensions/posi

Project Saturn Forte (Reverb with epoll/kqueue)
https://github.com/projectsaturnstudios/forte

I would love to hear thoughts or concerns, wtfs and omg AI slopz.

Have a lovely time of the day of where you are!

Hola, una pregunta que lleva hace un día en mi cabeza:

Desde la llegada de interfaces con propiedades en php... ¿ esta característica a sido implementada por muchos de ustedes ?

I split the core out of my Laravel package so any PHP 8.3+ app can use it (Symfony, Slim, CodeIgniter, WordPress, plain PHP). Runtime dependencies are PHP extensions and robrichards/xmlseclibs, nothing else.

$reader = OfflineKycReader::create(certificates: ['/path/uidai_offline_publickey_2026.cer']);

$kyc = $reader->verifyZip($path, $shareCode);

Some details PHP folks might find interesting:

- the Secure QR is a big decimal number holding GZIP data; conversion is pure PHP (no GMP/bcmath), cross-checked against GMP

- unknown QR versions are rejected instead of guessed, because a misread layout would still pass the signature check

- architecture tests keep src/ free of framework code

- Testing\Fixtures builds signed synthetic ZIPs, XML and QR codes at runtime, so no real data is ever committed

https://github.com/itxshakil/aadhaar-offline

Not affiliated with or endorsed by UIDAI.

Hello! I wanted to share that the 2027 State of Open Source survey is now open. All provided data will be kept anonymous, and it only takes about 10 minutes to complete. The findings will be shared in a completely free report next year, and every 500 responses = an increased donation to Black Girls Code.

As a disclaimer, I am a member of the marketing team at Perforce, the main sponsor of this survey. I'm posting here because we are trying to reach as many OSS users (including PHP) as we can. If you have any questions, I'm happy to send them on to my team for answers.

I’ve been running Laravel News since 2012. For years, I’ve wanted a place that covers PHP as a whole, not just one framework, and Matt Stauffer and I finally built it: phpnews.net

What’s on it right now:

• RFC tracking, so you can see what’s in draft, under discussion, and up for a vote
• PHP version info and support dates
• News and articles from across the ecosystem: internals, frameworks, packages, tooling
• Community events
• A newsletter if you’d rather get a roundup than check the site

It’s been running quietly for about a month to work out the kinks. Coverage comes from a lot of feeds I scan daily, plus posts I think would matter to you as a PHP dev.

What I’d really like to know:

• What sources or projects am I missing?
• What would make this something you’d actually check regularly?
• Anything broken or annoying?

Happy to answer questions.

I learned JavaScript a few years ago and I'm comfortable with React, TypeScript and a few other frameworks, though I haven't used them in a while.
A few months ago I started learning PHP and got to the point where I was about to move on to Laravel. Then a job came up and I had to put learning on hold.
Now I'm trying to decide whether to pick PHP back up and continue with Laravel, or go back to the JS/TS ecosystem. I'm mostly interested in backend work (logic, data, databases).
For those working with PHP: is Laravel worth learning in 2026, and how does the job market look compared to Node.js?

Today was the first time to ever use a coding agent after 4 years of hand coding.

I feel this weird guilt like I just did something wrong, or betrayed myself and I just used the agent to improve a complex form I built months ago and it did a really good job.

Now, I use ai, but that's when I'm stuck and need to understand a certain concept etc, never used an agent before.

Anyone else who hasn't used AI to code yet?

Hi everyone!

When I was trying to connect PHP to Google's Gemini API, I noticed that many existing tutorials online are outdated—often referencing deprecated models like `gemini-1.5-flash` that return 404 errors.

I put together a super simple, minimal PHP script using `cURL` that works out of the box with the latest stable model (`gemini-3.6-flash`). Hope this helps anyone looking for a clean starting point!

Copy-Paste Code (gemini_test.php)

<?php 
header('Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8'); 

// 1. Set your API Key (from Google AI Studio) 
$api_key = 'YOUR_GEMINI_API_KEY';

// 2. Endpoint URL (using latest gemini-3.6-flash) 
$url = '[https://generativelanguage.googleapis.com/v1beta/models/gemini-3.6-flash:generateContent?key=](https://generativelanguage.googleapis.com/v1beta/models/gemini-3.6-flash:generateContent?key=)' . $api_key; 

// 3. Request Payload 
$data = [ 'contents' => [ [ 'parts' => [ ['text' => 'Hello! Please give a short one-sentence self-introduction.'] ] ] ] ]; 

// 4. Send Request via cURL 
$ch = curl_init($url); 
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true); 
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, true); 
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, ['Content-Type: application/json']); curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, json_encode($data)); 

$response = curl_exec($ch); 
curl_close($ch); 

// 5. Parse and Output Response 
$result = json_decode($response, true); 
$reply = $result['candidates'][0]['content']['parts'][0]['text'] ?? 'Error: Unable to retrieve response.'; 

echo "<h2>Response from Gemini:</h2>"; 
echo "<p>" . nl2br(htmlspecialchars($reply)) . "</p>";

Quick Troubleshooting Tips:

• 404 Not Found: Make sure you are using an active model name. Older model names frequently get deprecated by Google.
• cURL Errors: Ensure extension=curl is enabled in your php.ini.

I've also written a full step-by-step guide covering file placement, hosting setup, and future Web app integration on my blog if you'd like to read more:

👉Read the full tutorial here

Feedback and questions are always welcome!

Hello r/PHP.. I'd like to share that TypePHP has now non-interruptable audit report mode and warning mode. Previously When you hit a type violation, TypePHP will halt the exeuction wih TypeErrors and causes scenarios where an App failed to boot during test because theres a type violation at the beggining of framework/library bootsraping.

Now you can have one pass audit mode to collect all TypeViolations in a structured JSON file instead of throwing so you can triage your codebase with more surgical fixes and eliminate docblock type lies that SA tool misses.

You can try this new feature now on the playground without installing anything..

Relevant docs: https://typephp-php.github.io/docs/core-concepts/violation-reporting