The PHP Revolution Is Underway: FrankenPHP 1.0 Beta

I'm very proud to announce the immediate availability of FrankenPHP 1.0 beta.

FrankenPHP is a brand-new application server for PHP, written in Go and built on top of Caddy, that dramatically simplifies the deployment of PHP apps, and brings new features to PHP such as:

- a worker mode that improves typical application performance by a factor of 3
- native support for HTTP/3
- native support for the 103 Early Hints HTTP status code (assets preloading)
- automatic HTTPS certificate generation and renewal
- native support for the Mercure protocol (real-time data broadcasting)
- and much more!

FrankenPHP is available as a Docker image (Debian, Alpine, PHP 8.2, and PHP 8.3 variants are available) and as standalone binaries with 0 dependencies for Linux and macOS.

Transcript

1. API PLATFORM CON 2023 - LILLE, FRANCE & ONLINE
2. The New PHP Era 01 02 03 04 The State of PHP API Platform 3.2 What’s Next
3. About Me ✔ API Platform creator ✔ Les-Tilleuls.coop co-founder ✔ Polyglot developer Kévin Dunglas dunglas@mastodon.social @dunglas dunglas.dev
4. The State of PHP A bit dated
5. PHP FPM Web Browser Web Server (NGINX, Caddy, …) HTTP REQUEST HTTP RESPONSE PHP-FPM PHP processes FASTCGI REQUEST FASTCGI RESPONSE
6. Deploying PHP Apps ✖ PHP doesn’t speak HTTP directly ✖ PHP must be bridged with a web server ✖ PHP-FPM is the most popular Server API (SAPI) - External server using the FastCGI protocol ✖ Alternative: mod_php for Apache: - Not compatible or not recommended with modern Apache
7. Deploying PHP Apps: Summary ✖ Unlike alternatives (e.g. Node), PHP has no built-in HTTP server ✖ PHP-FPM needs a 3rd-party web server ✖ This implies: ◦ At least 2 services ◦ A shared file (UNIX socket, best option) or a network link between the FPM and the web server
8. PHP Apps: Onboarding Local installation is complex, all users need: ✖ PHP-FPM ✖ A web server ✖ Same versions on every machine, and in prod ✖ Same configuration on every machine, and in prod ✖ Fortunately, Docker helps: API Platform distribution, Symfony Docker, Laravel Sail… NEW DEVS NOT WELCOME
9. PHP Apps: Docker / Kubernetes © sergioska
10. PHP Performance ✔ The language itself is now very fast (faster than Python or Ruby) ✖ But PHP is “fire and forget” ✖ Everything that is built to handle a request is then destroyed when the request is handled: - Symfony kernel - Symfony DIC - Services - In memory caches…
11. PHP Real-time ✖ PHP isn’t designed to support long-running connections (max_execution_time, no direct access to the network layer…) ✖ WebSocket, SSE, WebTransport and the like are not (or badly) supported by typical PHP setups ✖ It’s the same for other advanced/modern HTTP features (e.g. 103 Early Hints)
12. The New PHP Era The Modern Prometheus
13. Introducing FrankenPHP 1.0 beta
14. The Modern PHP App Server ✔ All in one HTTP server with native, vanilla, PHP support ✔ Cloud Native ✔ Built with Docker in mind… ✔ …but also available as a standalone static binary ✔ Worker mode ✔ Native Mercure support ✔ Early Hints and much more!
15. Web Browser PHP Threads Only One Service HTTP REQUEST HTTP RESPONSE
16. Moderner PHP Than Ever ✔ The official PHP executor is embedded in a state-of-the-art web server: Caddy ✔ Native support for HTTP 1, 2 and 3 ✔ Automatic HTTPS certificates generation and renewal (Let’s Encrypt or ZeroSSL) ✔ Copy your PHP files in the document root, that’s all! ✔ Popular PHP extensions, including OPcache and XDebug, are natively supported!
17. Docker Images $ docker run .:/app/public dunglas/frankenphp ✔ Exposes the current directory (as php -S) ✔ Built on top of official PHP Images ✔ PHP 8.2 and 8.3 variants ✔ Install PHP extensions as usual ✔ An Alpine variant exists (default: Debian)
18. One Binary To Rule Them All
19. One Binary To Rule Them All $ ./frankenphp run --config /my/Caddyfile ✔ Exposes the current directory (as php -S) ✔ Static binary (no dependencies) ✔ Caddy, FrankenPHP, PHP and all popular PHP extensions are embedded ✔ Available for macOS and Linux
20. Worker Mode ✔ Boot your application once and keep it in memory! ✔ Process incoming requests without having to boot your app again ✔ Compatible with API Platform and Symfony thanks to Symfony Runtime ✔ Written in C and Go (awesome concurrency engine) ✔ According to our benchmarks, 3.5x faster than FPM with API Platform ✔ Unlike alternatives (RoadRunner, Swoole…) ◦ entirely optional: typical apps still work with FrankenPHP ◦ runs in process: no network calls ◦ uses plain old superglobals: no need for PSR-7 etc
21. Worker Mode
22. Real-time: Built-in Mercure Hub
23. 103 Early Hints
24. Already Popular
25. ❤ Free Software
26. FrankenPHP and API Platform Best Friends Forever
27. API Platform 3.2 Beta Is Out! $ gh repo create my-project \ --clone --private \ --template api-platform/api-platform $ cd my-project $ docker compose up --wait
28. 3.2 Includes FrankenPHP ✔ Key feature: FrankenPHP is now part of the API Platform distribution ✔ Prod mode (Kubernetes, Docker Compose…) uses FrankenPHP workers ✔ The distribution has been dramatically simplified: only 1 core service for PHP ✔ You don’t have to change a single line of code! ✔ An FPM variant is still provided (for now)
29. Other Docker Improvements ✔ 6x times faster builds ✔ Cached layers reused across builds when using GitHub Actions ✔ Simplified and improved Dockerfiles ✔ Symfony Docker also benefits from FrankenPHP and these improvements
30. Before:
31. Now: 7x Faster
32. Native OAuth and OIDC support
33. Groundbreaking WASM-based runnable documentation
34. Improved DTO system
35. Better Extensibility And Dozens of Other Improvements
36. What’s Next Still Some Work To Do
37. Known Issues With FrankenPHP ✖ Fibers aren’t reliable (work in progress, in the Go runtime) ✖ Crashes when building the Symfony cache with the Alpine Variant (use Debian for now) ✖ Doctrine isn’t 100% reliable in worker mode (work in progress)
38. Going One Step Further
39. FOLLOW ME! @dunglas dunglas.dev / frankenphp.dev / api-platform.com Thank you! Any questions?