PivotPHP

Making PHP development joyful again.

PivotPHP is an experimental PHP ecosystem exploring Express.js-inspired patterns — one small, focused package at a time.

🧪 Project Status: PivotPHP is a research and development project. Perfect for prototyping, learning, and validating API concepts. Not recommended for production use.

• One thing well — each package owns a single responsibility (routing, HTTP, security).
• PSR everywhere — PSR-7 (HTTP), PSR-15 (middleware), PSR-17 (factories), PSR-11 (container), PSR-14 (events).
• Small packages — the core wires things together; features live in dedicated packages.

composer create-project pivotphp/skeleton my-api
cd my-api && composer serve      # http://localhost:8000

use PivotPHP\Core\Core\Application;

$app = new Application();

$app->get('/hello/:name', fn ($req, $res) => $res->json([
    'message' => "Hello, {$req->param('name')}!",
]));

$app->run();

Handlers receive PivotPHP\Http\ExpressRequest/ExpressResponse (the Express facade) over PSR-7. Security middlewares come from pivotphp/security:

use PivotPHP\Http\Factory\Psr17Factory;
use PivotPHP\Security\Cors\{CorsConfig, CorsMiddleware};
use PivotPHP\Security\Headers\SecurityHeadersMiddleware;

$factory = new Psr17Factory();
$app->use(new SecurityHeadersMiddleware());
$app->use(new CorsMiddleware($factory, new CorsConfig(['https://app.example.com'])));

Realistic, Docker-isolated benchmarks (same voting API across frameworks) live in pivotphp/benchmarks. PHP-FPM frameworks (PivotPHP, Slim, Mezzio, Symfony) run in the same ballpark; async runtimes (Webman) are faster but are a different architecture. Numbers are WSL2-relative — see the reports for details and caveats.

• Report bugs / request features in each repository's Issues (see its .github/ templates)
• Improve docs via the website
• Discuss in GitHub Discussions

• pivotphp/cycle-orm — paused; targets PivotPHP Core 1.x and is not yet migrated to Core 4.x. Not abandoned — it will be revisited.

• License: MIT
• Sponsorship: GitHub Sponsors